

I don’t have to walk more that 10 minutes to a “grocery store” where I live (which is kind of in between rural and urban) but occasionally I might walk 3+ km and back to somewhere with a better selection, take a backpack, that’s not an unreasonable walk to me. If I had to do it every day I might complain.
If it reassures you, I personally haven’t perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they’re much stealthier here, or they’re not here in much force.
Something I’ve seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they’d all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.
I’d imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it’s small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.