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.
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.
when you say import tax do you mean actual monetary payment? Or a computing power tax? I don’t think I understand
I was reading it as lowering the value of an upvote from instances that are known to harbor click farming accounts. I could be wrong though.
That defeats the purpose of decentralization and creates a dangerous precedent. The entire point of Lemmy is that every instance is equally valid and legitimate. If certain instances are elevated above others, we’re on our way to do what Gmail and Microsoft did to email.
I agree it would be a dangerous precedent.
Thing is, though, every instance is not equally valid and legitimate: that’s the reason for defederating from Threads.
Not sure what you mean by what Gmail and Microsoft did to email? Do you mean that they assume many unknown email origins are spam? Though Gmail’s obviously attracted a lot of users, and I myself have moved off it now to paying for my email provider elsewhere, I was under the impression it’s been quite good for email and for pushing secure email, and being good at anti-spam.
I mean that Microsoft and Gmail took over the email protocol and right now if you stand up your own email server with a new domain/IP you basically have zero chance to get your mail delivered anywhere. They’ve positioned themselves as “higher” authority because of the sheer number of users they control and can now control the entire email system.
Same thing could happen with instances if we elevate lemme.world or any other instance to be “more legitimate” so their user votes count higher.
Uh no. Just implement DKIM if your messages are not being sent correctly. Spam is killing email, making admins implement more protocols such as DKIM but that isn’t “google and Microsoft killing email”
Creating a foreign exchange for upvotes? 1 upvote from lemmy.world account = 25 upvotes from acconamatta.basementlemmy?
Maybe adjust by the number of upvotes coming from that instance (negatively) and by the number of upvotes users of your instance give over their (positively). If one instance spams upvotes, these upvotes loose value. If posts on that instance are popular with your users, the upvotes coming from that instance are more likely to have been made by real users. Maybe we can find a better metric to estimate the number of real, active users on another instance.
You can do it on your own instance, but the way Lemmy works means you’ll need to do some changes to both native code and SQL queries to make it work reliably. Every instance has complete control over how they display other instances’ data.