I feel like I'm missing something here, but isn't knowing what's under the hood exactly the point of projects like Lemmy? The source is available on github, and they explain the algorithms or talk about their political bias pretty openly in most communities.

Were you thinking more from the angle of the way our social biases work as a group, or like the risk of maintainers tampering with the sauce pre-release?

I hope this didn't come across shitty - genuinely curious.

You can join the Lemmy / ActivityPub developers' meetings via video chat anytime you like. I'm not "into" that level of things but I dropped in a few times just to see what's up - there's a definite axe or two they're grinding, not that they're bad people or out to hurt others at all, but if you don't detect some agenda basis from that crew, you need to think a layer deeper about what those people have been through and why they're doing something to make the world a better place in the future.

I'm sorry to see comments like this mindlessly downvoted. While I don't agree that Lemmy was built with any ill intentions, this thread results in good discourse.

For example, the platform itself lends itself to be used or abused to promote commercial interests or push one side of a story. The manner in which pro-Russian content has flooded Lemmy shows how the platform itself can be used to manipulate narratives, and there are no doubt many more subtle ways in which the community sentiment is being skewed in ways we might not realize.

Fair. Have you seen an example of this?

In my limited imagination, bots that flood a topic has a tendency to do that. The the "ask reddit" bots I see in "All".

Yes, and… it’s a skill that needs to be practiced. We don’t call it out as a skill, we don’t recognize it as a skill, and we don’t tell others that they need to practice it. So we get stupid shit like people saying they don’t do social media, on social media.

The world would be a much better place if we prioritized self-awareness as a universal skill.