Unidan could just create an account on multiple instances and vote for his posts/comments with all these accounts. That way his content would gain more attention than those of sincere users.
In case of malicious bots (like those annoying bootleg bots on reddit), it might even be profitable for them to create their own instance(s) just for that purpose.
Is there a mechanism to prevent that? (other than user/instance banning and the introduction question on user creation)
Malicious instances would need to be blocked by the instance you are registered to.
As for multiple accounts - couldn’t the same thing be done on reddit? Just make a bunch of alts and self-inflate your own posts/comments.
These issues are as old as the internet and can only be mitigated, not prevented.
Reddit has some kind of detection for that and you will get banned for using alts to vote your posts up.
I’m 99% sure reddit does a lot of backflips to detect and prevent that. One casual bad actor can only burn up so many IP addresses or API keys in a short period, and I think there’s some undisclosed/“secret” logic to it. It’s like burglary - you can’t stop it but you can cost the burglar sufficient time or money to deter them.
I haven’t dug into Lemmy’s code yet but I am curious what countermeasures against abuse are apart of federation. Signed, time-boxed tokens and IP addresses could be part of the protocol to mitigate abuse via federation.
There isn’t and Lemmygrad.ml users have been doing it in the past. Mostly down-vote brigading though and this is the main reason why down-votes are disabled on our instance.
Personally I think there should be a setting to prevent down-votes from federating as there is really no point in federating them to instances with other rules and different community culture.
Huh - I had not even considered downvotes in other instances… Yeah that seems problematic. Maybe rather than defederating downvotes, there could be a way to differentiate between local and global up/downvotes.
Brigaded up-votes are almost as harmful as brigaded down=votes. Down-votes also keep out the trolls until a critical mass of trolls has been reached. Hopefully there are more advanced methods in the future.
I guess this kind of instances will be banned. If it becomes obvious.
There are already a bunch of spam-bot-instances, the admins have to spot them and block them actively.
