They think that they can create an authoritative system and rules that will bring people in line
Sometimes it just seems that they were raised on authoritative media (including the TV news and radio they admire). First, the Levant stories about voices from the sky and burning bushes. Then Trump is famous for his TV personality of "you're fired!" commandments. Rick Roderick's 1990's descriptions help me with the words: "And on a Freudian account, it’s not accidental that that’s the time you reach out for large and invisible fathers to protect you… and mothers. And you know what, that’s elegant suspicion. It is not an argument; it’s an elegant suspicion. In fact when you look at the iconic significance of churches, you know the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the family values stuff, you know… I mean, I hate to sound cynical, but as Freud says, they whole thing is so patently infantile. So obviously infantile, that to anyone with the love of humanity it’s just sad to think that most people will never rise above this view of life."
It's sort of like WiFi and 5G mobile drivers (especially the software driven radios), a lot of proprietary stuff is in the driver that reveals hardware secrets. GPU is also regulated now for export controls from USA-derived technology. With software-driven radios, you see a lot of effort to keep people from using bands outside their national laws.
comments are hidden on some posts I’ve seen, like it says there are 8 but I see 2.
Lemmy has bug in counting too. Comments are often missing because of replication issues between servers. But the most common issue I'v seen with inflated comment numbers is edits being counted as new comments.
lemmy internally has SQL flaws that have not gotten much attention. A few days ago, over the weekend, lemmy.ca people studied some of the SQL and exposed a problem where every single new comment and new post on a local server updates 1500 rows in a database table where it should be updating just 1. There have been similar runaway SQL statements discovered. Fixes for the most recent issue are already on GitHub waiting for merge and publication.
The bugs in Lemmy are such that you don't even need to touch a server for it to be vulnerable. Cloudflare does not defend against such mistakes. Other servers can trigger deep PostgreSQL logic problems within Lemmy. Growing pains, a lot of the federation code was never tested, and today's crash is due to a logic issue with lemmy_server mistakenly updating 1700 servers it knows of through federation for a delete instead of the 1 local server.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database
A major PostgreSQL performance issue, logic mistake, was discovered today in lemmy_server and is an easy fix. Details: https://lemmy.world/post/2008987
There is an open issue on GitHub https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1999