They make a post asking Lemmy users a hypothetical question as to how they would go about doing it

They could create 6 accounts that post nothing but old memes all day every day

wait

They could undo some of the enshittification that Reddit has undergone over the past few years.

Step one, appoint a Cobra Commander.

Yes, but I think Lemmy is too busy hurting itself to really notice.

A few thoughts:

• Offer the folks running the largest instances a full-time, salaried position. Make them feel like kings/queens. (You will eventually fire them/try to destroy them.)

• Now Steve Huffman uploads the special folder on his desktop labeled PRIVATE GOONING MATERIAL and leaks to media that Lemmy is a haven of CP, so that eventually government gets involved and targets Lemmy as a left-wing radical organization allied with Antifa.

• Introduce a Reddit fediverse instance and aggressively federate with the remaining major instances while also encouraging the federation of Facebook, Google, etc...

In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.

The goal is simple. Try to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak.

You are speaking hypothetically, correct? Otherwise, source?

Their best strategy would be to poison the content with bot accounts, spam, and morally tasteless voices. Sullying the public perception of the content and services would stigmatize users. Since servers are funded by users and other donors, corporate lobbying or DDoS attacking to make it more expensive to host servers would also be an underhanded strategy.

my motiviation for using lemmy isn't that I like lemmy, it's that I hate reddit. so yeah, go for it spaz, i'll just use the next clone.

AI bot spam everywhere.

They already blocked the lemmy subreddit. Pretty sure they're already doing anything that they can get away with.

Those snoo avatars for the execs look like the most soulless looking art styles possible, sort of like how Chuck E Cheese got rebranded. Pretty gross.

This is all hypothetical of course.

But when actually you think about it, it sounds realistic. Many corporations operate like organized crime.

Nice try, spez. Your empire is crumbling.

Honestly, they should focus on actively moderating their content. I just deleted that app again, its full of ai generated content, full of agitprop, bots commenting walls and walls of engagement, everything and anything is an occasion for culture war bullshit...

Its insane how much the product has degraded, its like one good post for 20 scrolled down, and like half of them are reposts of the same goddamn content from months ago.

I think we should cherish lemmy, and hope to hell that it doesnt become that.

Wasn’t the lemmy sub recently banned?

Which one killed Aaron?

They'd have to pay out the $1M to consultants to forward for any actually-effective hands-on gruntwork of trying to influence the social media user market, or technical attacks on the code infrastructure or federated service provider resources. It would show somewhere in their financials.

why do they have to turn everyone into these weird funko pops

Nice try reddit execs!

I mean, all they gotta do is make a rule stating that talking about any alternative platforms is against TOS, so probably just that, assuming they can actually enforce it.

Otherwise, all they'd probably need to do is co-opt one of the morbidly obese, chronically online, single digit IQ power mods on there. In other words, any mod on that platform will do. All that bootlicker has to do is ban any and all free speech about Lemmy, as long as it's positive.

Damn, the photographer did one hell of a job to not make Spez look like the creepy little pedophile he is.

How could they actually sabotage Lemmy

The most logical approach I can think of would be starting up an instance, flooding it with bots, and using those bots to spread to other instances.

However I don't use Lemmy super often but from what I understand intance admins can block other instances so it wouldn't kill Lemmy entirely, it would just make it worse to use, which is a detriment because the most-cited reason I see for not getting involved in fediverse apps seems to be the learning curve upon entry. Open instances would be flooded with bots and all actively maintained instances would need to start isolating themselves from other instances and heavily screen who gets in

Let's assume top executives at Reddit are worried about Lemmy

I would be more interested in some theories about why that is possible. The feds have been proactive here, with private intelligence contractors advertising their ability to bore into every nook and cranny of social media, specifically mentioning the fediverse. Open source is under control by nature of the management of the time economy of programmers by capital. There is never enough time to keep up with what people need to be paid to do to live in the hours leftover afterwards they need to cook and clean and hypothetically woo their beloved

Nice try Huffman, Wong, Vallejo and Squires!

You think we are stupid? No! There are people who know what Linux is on this site!

Nice try!

All the need to do is go back to 2010 Reddit when it was focused in content aggregation and had open API access.

I doubt they give a shit. As much as I wish there was an alternative, Lemmy is inferior in almost every way still. Started off as a noble endeavor but now it's just full not only users that are bots but entire instances that are just spam bots.