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Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
367 points (95.5% liked)
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Nothing stops defederation, though.
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
But they can just be banned from those instances?
How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?
Banning trolls would be doable - they'd have patterns where they target specific users across many different communities. If the same user downvotes everything I've ever said, from controversial political takes to pictures of food to posts about gardening, that's probably a malicious user.
But "brigading" doesn't mean anything and I don't respect the concept. You can't ban it because you can't define it in a way that doesn't include normal usage of the site.
Right. How would you know what "the same user" is? Let's say that your posts get downvoted at random intervals by 5-10 users in the first 45-120 minutes. They all have different user names. What are you going to do? Create a report against any particular user and hope that the mods look into it?
If everyone's votes are public then it seems trivial to see how any particular user votes.
If user shithead69420 downvotes literally everything I post, they're probably not a good faith user.
Yes, but that's kind of my point?
if downvotes are public, the admin of your instance can see who is downvoting you and then they can take action. If the downvotes are coming from an instance that hides the real user for every vote, you and the admin are SOL.
Oh I see, you were talking about a hypothetical where all instances hide their votes and so no one knows who is voting on anything.
My assumption was that these vote records would remain transparent on most instances because the instances that hide their votes just get defederated, because those are always going to be instances where trolls hide.
Yeah, let's make things less abstract and talk about real examples.
piefed.social is not sending the real voters out. You think that alone should be grounds to get lemmy.ml (your instance) to defederate them. Am I understanding you correctly?
Oh no, I think defederation is only necessary when an instance becomes a problem. Until piefed.social becomes a haven for trolls to manipulate vote counts (which might never happen) then it's fine.
But if a dozen anonymized piefed.social votes start downvoting everything I say because they're monitoring my account then their admins would need to do something about it. If they didn't, I'd want defederation.