It’s marketing, it’s propaganda, it’s psyops. Influencing what posts make it to the front page, what posts stay in hot, what opinions get upvoted or downvoted just to make them look popular or unpopular. Mass reporting for posts that offend them. Having entirely fake, scripted conversations to convey points in a more trusted manner in order to influence the reader.

Remember, nobody is immune propaganda.

spam, agitprop, whatever

Upvotes and downvotes.

Right now, I can browse by New on my subscribed communities and see every post since the last time I did that.

I can view or re-view posts and read every response. If the responses are legion, I can play with hot/top and get the meat of the discussion.

Did you notice that last sentence? On the few posts where there are too many responses to view all, I’ll try to get at those that are relevant.

If the Lemmy community grows large enough, I’ll need to do the same for posts. I will no longer be able to regularly view by new and have time to see everything.

So, I’ll need to rely on some sorting method to make certain I see relevant stuff.

Someone with millions of bots that never post have millions of upvotes and downvotes to influence the score used by the sorting algorithm that I’ll use to decide what to read.

Because even bots are so sick of reddit’s shits and want to migrate

Because there is no karma system on lemmy (thank goodness, I’m against karma), you can easily create a 1000s of bots which will upvote your post and bring it to front page.

The solution is not some custom anti-abuse system which can be game. (Stuff like “you can’t vote because of the age of your account”, …) IMHO, the solution is bot detection. Since everything is public an an instance, somebody at some point will start scraping instance to detect bot behavior and inform instance owner. It will come with maturity.