PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated
The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I'm sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
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This is something that will be hard to solve. You can't really effectively discern between a large instance with a lot of users, and instance with lot of fake users that's making them look like real users. Any kind of protection I can think of, for example based on the activity of the users, can be simply faked by the bot server.
The only solution I see is to just publish the vote% or vote counts per instance, since that's what the local server knows, and let us personally ban instances we don't recognize or care about, so their votes won't count in our feed.
that would be the best way to do it, i guess if you go further you could let users filter which instances they would like to "count" and even have whole filter lists made by the community.
I like that idea. A twist on it would be to divide the votes on a post by the total vote count or user count for that instance, so each instance has the same proportional say as any other. e.g. if a server with 1000 people gives 1000 upvotes, those count the same as a server with 10 people giving 10 votes.
Wouldn't that make it actually a lot worse? As in, if I just make my own instance with one user total, I'll just singlehandedly outvote every other server.
I think it would actually be pretty easy to detect because the bots would vote very similarly to each other (otherwise what's the point), which means it would look very different from the distribution of votes coming from an organic user base