And I haven’t even touched on the thousands upon thousands of bots I’ve seen posting, commenting, getting awarded and boosted, and even running entirely-bot populated subs while admins and powers that be throw up their hands saying “welp nothing we can do” at the same time making it easier for bots to sign up, spread propaganda, and hide their tracks. Why? Because bots are their bread and butter. They drive up engagement. They boost reddits active user count (big number = investors happy). There exists an incentive not to do anything about it.

Nearly all of this applies to Lemmy too, though not quite as bad.

Incoming speculation.

You know the incentives of the developers. I suspect it’s why certain features are lagging. I also suspect it’s why Lemmy was made in the first place, in case big tech showed a political preference they didn’t like.

A lot of these problems are lessened by being open source and people able to run their own servers, but not completely solved.

Rust is better than Python. But Piefed doesn’t have most of these very important issues.

Any anonymous social media is going to have a big chunk of the bot problem, but I trust Piefed to fight it more than Lemmy. And Reddit of course will lean into the bots.