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.
If we stop spam accounts from brand new or low usage servers those could both be easily mailed (emulated activity, pre-create instances and let them marinate)
I don’t know much about how making new instances works, but could someone create instances in large qualities with smaller populations with the goal of giving human moderators too much work to defederate them all?
With the current Lemmy implementation, it’s not possible to blacklist wildcards. So, if you were to configure 1-100000.myevillemmy.com (or Mastodon, or whatever) and set up a boosting ring, admins wouldn’t be able to take action.
It would only take days before wildcard blacklisting would be implemented if that were to happen, though.