So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.
Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.
Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL
How to work out what instance(s) if someone does this: A Lemmy instance doesn’t have to send the same voting data to every instance, it could send different votes to different instances (stock Lemmy federates the same thing consistently, but there is no reason a modified Lemmy designed to catch someone doing this has to), encoding a signal into the voting pattern. Then, just check to see what signal shows up. If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.
All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.
On a fundamental level, this “choose your voters” thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user’s knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.
There’s just so many avenues for abuse here, and it’s disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.
It’s a fundamental property of the federated system. The devs need to acknowledge it the same way you need to acknowledge that people can lie. It’s a fact, there is no easy way around it and everyone knows it.