I mean every day you see massive influence campaigns playing out on reddit. Bots are real and completely distort reality and train people to be stupid. Right now everyone is laughing about a search engines web crawler "bots" being taken down, everyone piles on and completely, absolutely completely ignores the reality that the bots on the other side / fronts of the culture wars do more damage. It's disinfo and scapegoating in one.

So how CAN you have a social media without heavy moderation? Wealth means power. The power to have think tanks design influence campaigns and have PR corporations implement them. Like overwhelming power.

But we don't talk about it. Lemmy users are just as stupid, already trained like good dogs to fall in line and no better than reddit. Lemmy as a replacement to reddit has indeed already failed. But theoretically you want moderation, want to regulate that social media has to employ "more than enough" moderators to prevent bots and campaigns influencing our social media. Because that is how we lost our pluralistic western democracies.

So not that it matters now and maybe I misunderstood you. But "free" is just another word for "controlled by those with the most wealth".