Let’s assume the top executives of Reddit are worried about Lemmy.
Lemmy is taking away users and attention. The ressources that Reddit is desperately attempting to sell to advertisers.
In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.
Their goal is simple : to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no Reddit employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak in the media.
How could they actually sabotage Lemmy?
The most logical approach I can think of would be starting up an instance, flooding it with bots, and using those bots to spread to other instances.
However I don’t use Lemmy super often but from what I understand intance admins can block other instances so it wouldn’t kill Lemmy entirely, it would just make it worse to use, which is a detriment because the most-cited reason I see for not getting involved in fediverse apps seems to be the learning curve upon entry. Open instances would be flooded with bots and all actively maintained instances would need to start isolating themselves from other instances and heavily screen who gets in
The instance would just get defederated within 24 hours by 90% of the fediverse.