this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.
I mean if that's what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What's to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.
Sure, but the amount of work involved scales differently. To inflate post or comment rankings by a thousand votes, you’d need to create a thousand separate fake upvotes per item, whereas for subscription totals you misreport one number and the effect is permanent. That would make malicious actors harder to detect.