Fediverse

This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

In case anyone's wondering this is what we instance admins can see in the database. In this case it's an obvious example, but this can be used to detect patterns of vote manipulation.

expired

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.

PSA: internet votes are based on a biased sample of users of that site and bots

So far, the majority of content that approaches spam I've come across on Lemmy has been posts on !fediverse@lemmy.ml which highlight an issue attributed to the fediverse, but which ultimately have a corollary issue on centralised platforms.

Obviously there are challenges to address running any user-content hosting website, and since Lemmy is a comminity-driven project, it behooves the community to be aware of these challenges and actively resolve them.

But a lot of posts, intentionally or not, verge on the implication that the fediverse uniquely has the problem, which just feeds into the astroturfing of large, centralized media.

Honestly, thank you for demonstrating a clear limitation of how things currently work. Lemmy (and Kbin) probably should look into internal rate limiting on posts to avoid this.

I'm a bit naive on the subject, but perhaps there's a way to detect "over x amount of votes from over x amount of users from this instance"? and basically invalidate them?

I‘m not a fan of up- and downvotes, also but not only for the aforementioned reasons. Classic forums ran fine without any of it.

Upvotes aren't just a number, they determine placing on the algorithm along with comments. It's easy to censor an unwanted view by mass downvoting it.

IMO, likes need to be handled with supreme prejudice by the Lemmy software. A lot of thought needs to go into this. There are so many cases where the software could reject a likely fake like that would have near zero chance of rejecting valid likes. Putting this policing on instance admins is a recipe for failure.

I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.

Get rid of votes. They suck.

Reddit had/has the same problem. It's just that federation makes it way more obvious on the threadiverse.

Two solutions that I see:

1. Mods and/or admins need to be notified when a post has a lot of upvotes from accounts on the same instance.
2. Generalize whitelists and requests to federate from new instances.

What is the definition of a "fake account"?

I wonder if an instance could only allow votes by users who are part of instances that require email verification or some other verification method. I would imagine that would heavily help reduce vote manipulation on that particular instance.

They could try requiring a phone number to sign up. Obviously, you could use temp phone numbers but there’s ways to circumvent that.