The automated bot was created by the mod of pleasant politics in an effort to create a place to talk about politics that didn't have trolls and nasty people. It scans users across the lemmyverse and determines to ban or unban based on how inflammatory you are, which is determined by your downvote/upvotes ratio over time.
XMPP has quite good encryption nowadays, and at least according to our sysadmin, it's quite a bit lighter on system requirements. I think there was also some concerns about the matrix foundation being pretty corporate oriented.
Assuming they search Lemmy, and one of top results is the join-lemmy page (second result for me, below Lemmy.world), the server recommendation tool can suggest small instances with only a couple hundred members. For instance, if one selects Art as the topic and English as the language.
Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.
If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn't know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.
Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.
A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.
You sound like someone who would enjoy The Secret Life of Machines. I've never met anyone else in real life who wanted to watch it with me, for the reasons you mention.
According to this, urban farming seems surprisingly viable due to yields being so much higher than big ag farming. If we grew on rooftops and replaced parking lots with growing space, a city could theoretically become food self sufficient.
I think since the total amount of bullet votes isn't as massive as previously thought, it may only be somewhat outside of the norm, making the possible fraud less likely.
I can see where it may be best to be tactical with a demand for recount if it won't change the outcome, as then it could make it harder to have a recount in the next election to the point where it does change the outcome. That's just my 2 cents tho.
The automated bot was created by the mod of pleasant politics in an effort to create a place to talk about politics that didn't have trolls and nasty people. It scans users across the lemmyverse and determines to ban or unban based on how inflammatory you are, which is determined by your downvote/upvotes ratio over time.