this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
2249 points (99.9% liked)

Fediverse

17776 readers
31 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

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

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
deadsuperhero@lemmy.ml
wakest@lemmy.ml
2249
PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by koper@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
364 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Mikina@programming.dev 31 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[โ€“] Maebbie@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (4 replies)