

I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.
Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.
I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.
In theory, it’s just an algorithm that will always produce the same output given the exact same inputs. In practice it’s nearly impossible to have fully deterministic outputs because of the limited precision and repeatability we get with floating point numbers on GPUs.