

Read the article instead of responding to the title. It was a university conducting formal research, which created AI bots that impersonated different identities. “As a black man…” style posts in ChangeMyView.
The subreddit mods issued a formal complaint to the university when they learned of it, but the university is choosing not to block its publishing on the grounds of lack of harm.
Fediverse can’t sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don’t have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can’t do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn’t be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn’t do it via Lemmy.
I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can’t do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can’t replace, but I’d rather never have to open reddit in the first place.
Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I’m still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.