To be completely honest, unless they’ve already gotten patents (which would require them to disclose the specific algorithms, and is highly unlikely to be of any general features), they’re probably SOL. I doubt they have that in place already and I doubt they’re going to openly describe any secret sauce for patents.

What is more likely the case is the embrace, extend, extinguish approach whereby they’ll find what makes Lemmy stick in open source sense (I.E. Activity Pub protocol), “embrace” it by making Reddit interoperate with it, “extend” the protocol such that they could offer some unique features to draw users into their platform to leverage the unique features, and then “extinguish” the open source flame by abandoning the public protocol after they achieve what they want.

If and when you see Reddit adopt ActivityPub, be real careful of what comes next.