commercial and propaganda bots have a tendency of taking small fora, and other sites with the ability to post, offline, as they overwhelm these super tiny venues, once their automated scrapers find them. There doesn’t have to be a team of people doing something other than monitoring bots.

Also, I doubt anyone gets exposed to lemmy alone. It is very reasonable to believe many spend time on places worth using actual people to tailor their messaging to, and then carry that over here, and anywhere else they go. Point being, there no place so small that it becomes void of this.