They used sockpuppet accounts to game r/adviceanimals to push posts from quickmeme.com to the top and bury their competitors. At the time it was the most popular image macro site and subreddit. Once it was exposed, that format of meme basically collapsed.

Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can't as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.

The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.

I mean, it kinda is.

Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The "every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn't correctly moderate everything" means that it's close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there's too many people on the platform.

Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.

Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it's kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.

For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.