I love it, but I fear for the day Lemmy becomes so popular that it is worthwhile for the corporate bots to begin gaming Lemmy’s algorithm to dominate front pages. I don’t think Lemmy is prepared to defend against this.
I think we might reach a point that, instead of one application in the beginning, we'd have to have periodic "re-verification" to prove that you are human (and haven't been taken over by a bot). Like maybe once every 6 months. And on the 5th month, you can begin early submission for the re-verification application.
Part of what makes Reddit so great is the huge community of content creators. Both the posts and comments. Lemmy has slowly been catching up, but still is far off.
Defederating from large instances will just result in lower quality content for those instances. I would hope there’d be a better solution, but I’m not smart enough to think of one.
Maybe the secret is to let each instance control their own sorting algorithm. They keep getting the content from the large instances, but control how it gets brought to the front page. My guess is this would be no small task, but that would definitely make it difficult to game the algorithm.