Thank you for that clarification. I'm surprised, but then I suppose there really isn't much else they can do about vote bots and brigades. A warning would have been nice, but given that Lemmy is starting to show evidence of the kind of bots that are killing reddit (and all social media), I can understand their position.
I was there for the early days of Voat, which was an earlier version of a Reddit clone. Those first few months were nice, but it quickly devolved into a hate-filled N*zi safe haven.
Fediverse has an early version of a bot problem, which is ubiquitous in all social media these days (thanks to state actors and also corpos that want you to think/feel a certain way). idk how the fediverse is handling the bot problem, but for now it seems to be less noticeable here than other places.
If the platform is truly "free speech" without any moderation, then it will quickly devolve into worse than 4chan.
Voat is gone now, which is a good thing, but if you have an programming background you can use an LLM to study the way it self-destructed by looking at the archive.org snippets. See how it quickly became theDonald but worse.
That is what will happen to this un-moderated decentralized social media protocol.
I'm beginning to see that. I've found a few other science communities in other instances that I think will work better in my feed.