between one buyer with fairly limited funds and few large corporations with extensive funds
Which is the same as saying that every vote is transferred between one voter, with very limited knowledge and political awareness and a few politicians with extensive power because politics is what they do their entire life.
Democracy is, in many practical sense, a market for votes. One which is way less regulated than the one for goods and services
the classical- and neoliberal ideas that humans are rational actors
Be very careful with this, because this is also the very foundation of democracy. If we start saying humans can't decide for themselves over insignificant phone charger, how could we trust them selecting the people who has much more power than that?
I think the main problem with Lemmy (and with Mastodon and many fediverse software too) is discoverability, expecially when the network is so small like in our case.
Lemmy ranking algorithm suck, it never succede in showing me interesting content, unless you opt for a "subscribed only" feed I can't see why follow communities if they never impact how they appear, and discovering new interesting communities is basically impossible, all the ones I follow are from reddit refugees that left a pinned post on Reddit saying "you can find us at this Lemmy instance as c/..."
The left didn't touch it either and they had decades to do so.
Reality is, a third of the country is more than 60 years old, which kind of fool must you be to oppose such a strong voting demographics?
Well, that's not our democracies work. We don't let people vote every law by referendum, that would be spreading power as much as possible.
In ancient Athens it was common, as was common for judiciary decision to be made by 3-4 hundreds people drawn at random. But that's something almost universally considered stupid now, we have a judge, who we consider an "expert" in law.
By your definition, we don't live in a democracy, on the contrary, democracy is extinct on this planet