The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
That sounds a bit hyperbolic.
You can externalize the web of trust with a decentralized system, and then just link it to accounts at whatever service you’re using. You could use a browser extension, for example, that shows you whether you trust a commenter or poster.
That list wouldn’t get federated out, it could live in its own ecosystem, and update your local instance so it provides a separate list of votes for people in your web of trust. So only your admin (which could be you!) would know who you trust, and it would send two sets of vote totals to your client (or maybe three if you wanted to know how many votes it got from your instance alone).
So no, I don’t think it needs to be invasive at all.
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My point is you can have a mixed system. For example:
That’s not a ton of data, and the “special interest” users wouldn’t need to be synchronized to any other instance. The client would store the WoT data and update the server as needed (this way the server doesn’t need any transitive logic, the client handles it).
Facebook and Twitter have always had their equivalent of upvotes be public.