I’m not convinced. You’ve made several claims, and maybe it’s obvious to you as to why it’s hard for corporations to infect the fediverse, but not to me. I’m probably too smooth brained to see it.
Here is Phil Jamesson using the behaviour of Reddit and the upvote system to get to the top of /r/videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69bFOYklP-E
What is stopping the marketing team of a corporation to influence the fediverse using similar and more advanced techniques? Lemmy uses an upvote system. Why can’t it be abused like Reddit’s system?
I’ve already seen several examples of small scale brigading. I can’t mention examples because it would immediately make this post another target.
Often when brigading happens, it’s not just the one comment that gets downvoted, you’re whole post history gets downvoted. Heavily downvoted posts don’t show up in feeds, and you end up struggling to interact with the community. Some communities will outright ban (or shadow ban) a heavily downvoted account. Its forced ostracism.
It may not be openly allowed, I understand that. The problem is when you have bad faith actors and shills. They pretend to be not associated with a corporation, but they subtly push an agenda.