this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by koper@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] Andreas@feddit.dk 44 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

[–] Wander@yiffit.net 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This. It's only a matter of time until we can automatically detected vote manipulation. Furthermore, there's a possibility that in future versions we can decrease the weight of votes coming from certain instances that might be suspicious.

[–] hawkwind@lemmy.management 8 points 1 year ago

And it’s only a matter of time until that detection can be evaded. The knife cuts both ways. Automation and the availability of internet resources makes this back and forth inevitable and unending. The devs, instance admins and users that coalesce to make the “Lemmy” have to be dedicated to that. Everyone else will just kind of fade away as edge cases or slow death.