There'd be a lot more money blackmailing the company than to mess with CSAM.

There isn't a company to blackmail. You can't treat the Fediverse as a competing company because it isn't one. You have to treat it more like a movement, like Occupy Wall Street

How do you derail a movement? You make sure the participants are slandered to the point that your accusations are the main things people on the outside remember of it. Mainstream Media did this with Occupy successfully.

However this doesn't work if your opponent is too big, too established or too well funded. Microsoft tried to do this with the Open Source Movement, but the latter was too well established and funded for it to work.

Big corps are a lot sneakier than something so blunt.

That's the thing, they're not being blunt at all. Literally anybody can pay for this kind of attack to happen and not even the service provider needs to know who the buyer is.

The only thing that is needed now are media hitpieces about how federated services spread CSAM and you've got damage that could make the YouTube adpocalypse look small.

Risk outweighs the rewards.

What risk? Keep it off the books, take standard dark web precautions when purchasing such a service and there's no chance it'll be traced back to you.

Especially for something as small as lemmy.

Small but growing, and steadily establishing itself. That's a momentum certain companies will want to kill.

Take off the tin foil hat. It doesn’t work like that.

ahahahahaha.

My sweet summer child, I've seen it first-hand work EXACTLY like this. I work in the field of offensive security. On the one hand it first amazed me how much big legitimate companies play in that space but then I realised - of fucking course they do. It only takes a bit of know how to sweep most things under the rug.