Reddit's business model is unholy and toxic

Their goal would probably just be to have what twitter has, where brands like burger king and wendys, who have thousands of followers, send heart emojis back and forth to other brands, lol.

Does Lemmy have any kind of protection against stuff like vote manipulation from bot accounts?

Not besides the captcha signup. BUT, my original intention was, unlike reddit, which is happy to allow bots and vote manipulation, to be very strict about having bots be a separate entity from users. And the fact that most bots or things like RES are just extra features that reddit wouldn't or didn't think to add in the first place. Being an open source project, its possible to add those features directly into lemmy.

One way I can think of to keep out bots past signup, is to periodically, maybe every few weeks, log users out and require a captcha for sign in again, but I imagine people wouldn't like being logged out. Its something we'll def have to keep an eye on.

Actually, eveything that has to do with the above entities is USA USA USA

And maybe a good seasoning of Europe. China is nothing more than the oregano sprinkled on a pizza after it has been served.