Lemmy is 1000x more real than reddit, but I have found it to be very susceptible to echo chambers. I agree with a lot of the echos in the chamber, and yet I find a lot of people taking nuance out of discussions or believing falsehoods from headlines alone. It's annoying to me, because many if these topics are extreme enough as is, there's no need to hyperbolize. But there is not a lot in the way of difering opinions (when it comes to big topics)

like it’s an actual forum with real people with real engagement.

Because it's small.

The only bots are from people hobby botting to learn about. If it grows then we'll see intentional bots like anywhere else.

Federation gives unique challenges tho. A big open instance will have a huge bot problem because of how many instances could host the bots. A locked down instance won't see any bots.

Like early Reddit, when we migrated from Digg