Surely there is no way to prevent vote manipulation if you allow votes from any instance to be counted. How does lemmy plan to get lots of vote information to help sort posts on small instances without being vulnerable to manipulation?

    • sterOP
      1·
      4 years ago

      It’s different on non-federated platforms because they can try to prevent spam by preventing people creating large numbers of accounts. They are somewhat successful. In theory on a decentralised platform you could make votes meaningless with a single malicious instance.

    • abbenm
      11·
      4 years ago

      Wait, what? Other non-federated platforms have the abuse, therefore the abuse is not a problem? I am not understanding that logic.

      Federating give you the option of quarantining bad behavior off to instances via defederating, which should help protect from the abuse.

        • abbenm
          2·
          4 years ago

          Understood. And well, if you haven’t heard it before, let me say so now. I certainly suspect that there is vote manipulation that happens on reddit. Whether it’s from people on private Signal group chats sharing links to go mass vote on something, bots that take popular content and re-post it at predictable cycles, russian troll farms, or rings of “influencers” and mods who organize themselves into in-groups and out-groups supporting their own content and banning posts that call them out, etc. I think reddit has experienced manipulation and it’s something potentially ripe for abuse here as well.