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.
Reddit had ways to automatically catch people trying to manipulate votes though, at least the obvious ones. A friend of mine posted a reddit link for everyone to upvote on our group and got temporarily suspended for vote manipulation like an hour later. I don’t know if something like that can be implemented in the Fediverse but some people on github suggested a way for instances to share to other instances how trusted/distrusted a user or instance is.
An automated trust rating will be critical for Lemmy, longer term. It’s the same arms race as email has to fight. There should be a linked trust system of both instances and users. The instance ‘vouches’ for the users trust score. However, if other instances collectively disagree, then the trust score of the instance is also hit. Other instances can then use this information to judge how much to allow from users in that instance.
This will be very difficult. With Lemmy being open source (which is good), bot maker’s can just avoid the pitfalls they see in the system (which is bad).
I got suspended multiple times because my partner and daughter were also in our city’s sub, and sometimes one of them would upvote my comments without realizing it was me. It got really fucking annoying, and of course there’s no way to talk to a real person at reddit to prove we’re different people. I’d appeal every time and they’d deny it every time. How reddit could have gotten so huge without realizing that multiple people can live in the same household is beyond me. In the end they both just stopped upvoting anything in the sub because it was too risky (for me).
That’s such a hilariously bad metric for detecting a bot network too. It wouldn’t even work to detect a real one, so all that policy ever did was annoy real users.
Hearing that, I wonder if they were using an IP address based system. That would cause real problems for people using a VPN, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
RIP u/unidan
I think it’s the 3rd party app or VPN thing that would have saved your friend.
nope, i tried manipulating votes from apollo once and got a warning
Were you on a VPN?
nope, so that’s probably it
I got that message too when switching accounts to vote several times. They can probably see it’s all coming from the same ip.