Hahah. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. Fediverse’s does a lot of self harm it seems.
But after my experience, I’m honestly more suspicious of outside manipulation than I was before. Some of the behavior is so aggressively self-defeating that I have a hard time believing everyone pushing it genuinely thinks they’re helping Lemmy,really a lot of dump unreal patterns.
I’m not saying I can prove they’re Reddit agents. I can’t. But nobody can rule it out either. and follow the money - its in their interests to sabotage this place.
If you wanted to weaken a competitor, you wouldn’t need to create the divisions. They’re already here. You’d just amplify them, encourage the most anti-growth voices, target prolific contributors, and let the community do the rest for you.
And after watching this play out firsthand, that possibility seems a lot less crazy to me than it did before.