Representative Democracies have failed (are failing) like all other political ruling systems have failed so far. Some failed just faster than others that failed more catastrophically while some fail silently (agonizing). In the end all systems failed.
Millions of bots programmed by meta employees?
Voting is voting. Nobody was talking about fair, equal etc votes.
Right now the way votes are cast it imperfect and can be exploited by using sockpuppet accounts, but this can change at any time and switch to a polling service. Is that better? Well maybe, electronic voting is hard.
But as I said: Your issue is a non-issue, the inherent nature of the Fediverse makes it irrelevant, just switch instance, self-host... There's no exclusivity here. You're not the customer or the product here, you're a contributor and you can contribute from anywhere.
How about embrace and enshittyfy like Google Talk did with XMPP?
There you have indeed a point. However instead of saying this first you exhibited exactly the behaviour OP is criticising. Maybe reconsider and try to be a more decent human being?
Very welcoming. Have you considered that OP could be right and you wrong or are you so up your own ass that this is out of question?
Maybe what he says is correct but not accepted by society? Unheard of, I know.
E pur si muove.
I ditched Reddit a few weeks ago for other reasons (I am going full FOSS/decentralised services). My Reddit account was 11 years old, I don't miss it at all.
At least that's what I hope. There are a few things we need to roll back though: Messaging needs to be decentralised again (think what jabber/xmpp did, federation between Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc etc).
There's a reason email still lives as a protocol despite all it's flaws and shortcomings: Decentralisarion and interoperability. The Fediverse can give us, the uses, the control (back) of what once was the free and open internet (usenet, gopher, ftp, http, smtp, etc).
Actually we're in a fork of reality where the plot from Tron kinda happened, only there's not one MCP... There's Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit et al who disowned us users, served us non-open, centralised websites and services.
Google: Laughing in Android.