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Right, and I'm thinking this is not actually a solid way to protect fediverse from what is happening everywhere else.
We can all create instances, but there needs to be engagement for it to matter. I'm not looking at this from the point of view of "what can I do to enjoy my time on the internet while my rights are taken away and I'm told my sister should go to jail for wanting an abortion"
There is a pattern that occurs with seizing digital spaces. It starts small. They begin dog whistling in small communities. Not enough to get banned. Just enough to get reactions. Based off the reaction they target a few of the weaker ones. Whistles get louder. They link those to their influencers who post to their base. That base begin to show up and the community begins to fracture. Mods get overwhelmed. Ask for help to increase mod team. Some of the new mod team are the very people poisoning the community or are affiliated. The new moderators make it worse. Users begin to block or leave the communities. More dog whistles. More growth from the right until the community is captured. They move on to target another bigger community and are now using the first community as a pool to feed into the bigger one and turn it. So you can de-federate but nothing really stops the attacks. There is no real mechanism right now to guard against what has happened as far as I see it.
If lemmy were to grow as big as other sites, it will be just as likely to swing hard right unless something else is done.
If you're wanting a planned in advance ideal solution, that's not really possible, but people can collectively respond to problems as they happen and adapt, as long as they aren't constrained from doing so.
I believe the pattern and tactics you describe are always going to be more effective on a platform controlled by a company like Reddit, because any efforts to counter them are ultimately limited by the agenda of the platform owners. There are people on Reddit trying to investigate and call out deceptive commercial spam, but when the spammers block them to prevent a response, set their post history to be unreadable, buy moderator positions, and admins only care about their own power and profitability (cutting users off from api etc), the deck is stacked against them. In the end it's just not their website.
Ultimately this is an organizational challenge, not only a technical or platform design challenge. If the organization is a collection of users who generally want genuine non-manipulative interaction between real people, and the protocol is set up to make it easy for them to route around malicious attempts to usurp control, that doesn't mean immediate victory over adversaries but it is a big leg up.
The "swing to the hard right" comes as soon as more normies arrive. There are basically two ways this goes:
a) badly behaved normies get the boot. comes with the side effect of keeping the cost for instance admins low and the work for mod teams small, but also means that we stay a niche. I have no issues with this.
b) normies come here and do as they always do. this is your scenario. Since normies - since they are normies - will simply swarm to single instances, as we saw at the API exodus, the rest of the fediverse will sooner or later defederate from those single instances if they aren't able to keep their normie horde in check. This is fine, actually. If i really want to look at something only the normies are talking about, i can simply fire up my normie-instance account and see all i want.
Since we have a simple mechanism of keeping badly behaved instances in check, i cannot see how your scenario actually comes to fruit.
Both a) and b) only works for so long. We're not talking just about users. We're talking about coordinated efforts by group's backed by financial support to slowly take over. I've seen them go so far as getting themselves onto mod teams. They have it down to a science mean if we're not making them rewrite their books constantly then lemmy is just going to go the way of all other platforms.
I do not agree to your premise that we can't do anything against your scenario. It's simply a matter of moderation or the lack thereof. Compromised Instances will sooner than later get defederated.
Best Example: lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml - those are the instances of the lemmy coders, which are hard auth-left, and even they got defederated by most of the fediverse, and piefed was created (besides other reasons) to get a codebase that isn't dependent on russia-apologists.