I don't think they are just for show. There are differences in which policies each party try to pass. The GOP is clearly fascist. The democratic party are clearly not fascist.
I don't really agree that Brave should not be used because of a toxic fanbase.
I think the best reason not to use Brave is that they are a marketing/advertising company that claims to give their users privacy. Advertising companies will always have an incentive to invade privacy as it increase add revenues. Brave is just copying Google's business model with extra steps.
I still use reddit as it has content lemmy doesn't.
But yeah I think there is a lot of bots/shills that manipulate the conversation on reddit that doesn't really happen on lemmy. This will happen on lemmy too if it gets big enough.
Federation is also cool. If lemmy does end up full of bots/shills then someone could make a new instance with some new rules that help to reduce the number of bots (e.g. answer some questions about a post to comment or something).
It might be a good idea for journalists and other targeted people to have multiple burner phones for different activities.
That way if your personal device is infected itnisnkess likely to compromise your human rights work.
You would probably want to turn off any phone you are not using as they are able to access the camera and mic.