Does ActivityPub send those to other instances, or does ActivityPub only send the original post and the rest (upvotes, downvotes, replies) are stored only on the original server where the post was made?
Does ActivityPub send those to other instances, or does ActivityPub only send the original post and the rest (upvotes, downvotes, replies) are stored only on the original server where the post was made?
What if someone sets up an instance, make a post and manipulate the upvotes? Just give it a million upvotes. That would break the whole system…
Or a bit more subtle, every upvote is multiplied by 10.
Individual votes are federated but not by number but by user, so you’d have to set up fake users and then federate a vote from each of them.
That makes it rather easy to detect and identify and get that particular instance defederated.
Votes will still go from origin instance -> community instance -> other instance, be if the other instance has defederated the origin instance then it simply gets dropped.
If you use kbin you can even see who has made each upvote, so yes easy to then look for patterns of voting together and also at the profiles to see if the accounts looks like real people etc.
So the cost of getting a post on the front page of every Lemmy instance is the cost of registering a new domain.
Until a mod catches it and reports it to the admins, yeah.
Lemmy isn’t the absolute most well thought out platform in many regards, I don’t think anyone expected Reddit to actively go hostile and drive such an amount of users to Lemmy.
Def not, I’d say Lemmy was at least a few years out from being stable and on par with Reddit as far as software goes. There are still fundamental questions and problems that need to be answered and solved.
I say was because Reddit going hostile and driving such a large influx of users is a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand it was just barely ready for more active use, but not to scale.
OTOH, the large influx is also driving accelerated development so Lemmy was years out before, but what about now now that it’s getting all this focus and drive to get things done, that I do not know, but I’d say it’s much faster than it was before