Monthly amount is the way to go! I chip in a whole fiver over at feddit.org each month, because that's easily worth it. You get what you pay for, after all.
Quite the opposite. Due to systemic corruption autocracies are economically highly inefficient with low productivity across the board with all kinds of long term effects this brings. And while it might look bad for democracies at the moment, I think many of the current crop of autocracies will be short lived. In the end, economy is where it's at, and autocracies are horrible at it.
What federation protects from is the singular owner of the platform sweeping in and setting/enforcing new rules for some or all communities. This could still happen on one instance, but new instances can mitigate the effects. Single communities can still turn bad, but it will be up to the users to decide whether to stick around or move to other communities.
I never followed any competitive sports, always found them quite boring. Add to it the insane levels of corruption and abuse prevalent in commercial sports and I find it hard to understand how people can even enjoy them.
This attitude is exactly the problem. The current situation is new and unprecedented. Not seeing the difference is the type of ignorance that allowed this to happen in the first place.
The show is the point. Users are supposed to self-censor out of fear, which is far more effective than any form of automated censorship. Reddit just implement the "chilling effect".
Doing this research transparently is a good idea, it will only be a matter of time before other actors will try and use LLMs to influence lemmy. Like spam, bots and farms, this is a reality the fediverse will have to deal with eventually. Better start preparing now.
It's like a fucking forum for adults!