Marxism-Fennekinism

In all seriousness: yes. Any app or even website can scan your local network and attempt to access other devices. This is apparent in the fact that dedicated network scanner apps like Fing don’t require any permissions to scan your network, therefore any app can if it wanted to.

As an aside, can any organisation just start calling themselves a university with zero accreditation or independent checks? Is that word not regulated?

Getting really tired of this “the fediverse needs to cater to normie interests because we’re here now and it’s what we deserve” attitude. If you can’t find a community to click with, you can always create one, join one you don’t know much about with an open mind, or don’t use the fediverse if it doesn’t have the content you like. Sorry to say it but you’re not special and no existing users on any social media platform is obligated to go out of their way to make you feel comfortable on the platform.

Same with the “your open source, community developed platform/client sucks! I demand you make the UX better because I the user deserve better! No I’m not going to donate to your development fund because you suck and need to be better before you deserve my money!” sentiments that I see on Lemmy more and more now. Seems like everyone just expects corporate level user experience and customer service from people developing open source software mostly for free as passion projects. Even after the numerous corporate boondoggles that drove people to the fediverse in the first place people aren’t the slightest bit willing to change their paradigms regarding how social media should be run.