I was one of those people, I didn't understand the logic behing defederating instances with open registrations but now it turns out that those instances were right about doing that even though their reason sfor defederations were different.

DDoS usually cost money to run, Lemmy/Kbin are small potatos with no cash to ransom, so there’s not really a point except to troll, in which case users can just spin up more servers and push back on the attacker’s cost/impact.

I do get the sense it would be relatively easy to DoS Lemmy, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

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Owners can use those bots to boost choosen posts/comments with a lot of upvotes or downvote something into oblivion if they don't like something. Bots can be also used for spam and advertising stuff. Overall, if the bots become active the platform will be fucked as the quality of everything will go down. One problem that affects us now is that we lost a reliable way of telling how much factual users are on the platform.