it would be very silly to make a private server of scratch

I don't think anyone but people who work for Scratch Foundation will ever know.

No. The Scratch API contains a lot of secrets that can be easily abused by the community (for example, stuff relating to how projects end up on trending).

I don't know if this applies to the 3.0 APIs, but regarding open-sourcing scratchr2, thisandagain has stated the following:

scratchr2 is a big monolithic (and also now legacy) codebase that is very tightly tied to our old moderation systems as well as our infrastructure. Because of this, MIT was not comfortable granting us permission to open source the codebase. For everything new we work on, we try to have the code be much more modular which makes it much easier to open source / get approved by MIT's lawyers.

TL;DR: no, for legal reasons

Hopefully, Scratch has been trying to do what thisandagain said

DifferentDance8 wrote:

No. The Scratch API contains a lot of secrets that can be easily abused by the community (for example, stuff relating to how projects end up on trending).

Couldn't Scratch remove whatever formula they use in their trending page when they publish the code?

ajskateboarder wrote:

DifferentDance8 wrote:

No. The Scratch API contains a lot of secrets that can be easily abused by the community (for example, stuff relating to how projects end up on trending).

Couldn't Scratch remove whatever formula they use in their trending page when they publish the code?

Yes, but there's probably a lot of stuff that they would want to remove and they cant be sure they find it all.