I am curious what can be done about the Lemmy.World era of botting corpo comments to protect their investments?
Anything remotely federated w/ LW has a massive hard-on for corporations (anti-piracy boot-lickers only added us back when we had the largest community in the fediverse), racism (you ain't american, you aint right), a desire to troll/argue in bad faith, and a general "fuck you, I have 500 accounts to down-vote with."
I myself have over 60 accounts on Lemmy.World; and because of that, I am 100% certain somebody has a type of SMM portal to scan for keywords and upvote/downvote accordingly.
Don't believe me?
Go post about Apple, Facebook, Tesla, or any other 1% owned entity, and watch which accounts upvote/downvote in less time than required to read the post.
I don't think that's quite the reason. lemmy.dbzer0.com was never closed for registrations, but added an application very soon which protected us from a lot of struggles. I Think LW got popular because it's a very centrist instance, so people who don't know what else, naturally flock to it. It was also one of the very first one, so it got a lot of early mover advantage, while lemmy.ml fell flat on its face becuase the admins didn't think to upgrade their infra to something that could handle it until the migration was over.
I feel like many other instances did also shut their doors, wasn't just lemmy.ml, I never tried signing up to dbzer0 back then (didn't come here until after world's big feud over c/piracy) so I don't know entirely what the situation here was like at the time here, I just know that enough instances took the route of either completely closing or very strict application procedures to make it difficult for Redditors migrating here.
I don't deny though that another big part of it definitely was lemmy.world's more centrist mentality and more lenient moderation.