Alright, this one will be weird but I’m coming to accept I might be way further on the spectrum than I thought. Reader beware, it’s probably dumb but kind of amusing and fun to think about.
We are currently dealing with various kinds of vote manipulation and that affects visibility of things even if we don’t care about imaginary points. As long as they are used for sorting they’re not that imaginary because I can sort by new but most will not have time and will want to peek. Now, the main issue here are the extremes - instances used to flood votes or weirdos stalking other users.
Currently Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin create a federated network but votes are still kind of a direct democracy. What if that democracy was federated too? One can think of this as federating consensus. There are two approaches to implementing this but the idea boils down to either outside instances aggregating votes made on their side and sending final voting result on a scale -1/0/1 or alternatively this aggregation could be done by the hosting community.
What this solves:
- Flooding is harder because you need to keep on making instances.
- People have more motivation to join smaller instances because that way their vote matters more.
- People have more motivation to join interest / theme / location based instances so that their vote is aggregated with similar people.
- Weirdos will set up their own instances meaning even more decentralisation.
Creating a fake instance to send out votes is cheaper and easier that you think. You need only one domain and a script.
It can’t be stopped this way but this is just some friction or increasing barrier to entry to discourage it. Most people are lazy and will just drop it as not worth the effort, and the most persistent will be annoying no matter what you do.
It won’t stop the people interested in doing mass-manipulation of votes. There is no virtual difference between a bot that votes through Lemmy and a bot that votes through “pure” ActivityPub.