> Scraping for federated networks isn't necessary a bad thing either if people want different interfaces without having to register for developer keys.

i’m not sure i understand all of this, but i don’t think you generally need developer keys to use your own interface in this space. in the case of Pleroma (the focus of this article), the default interface is a SPA that i think doesn’t get fed any special state but just populates the interface using documented API calls. so 3rd party apps don’t usually need any special approval.