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?
Since you’ve gotten enough real answers, I’ll just remind you that upvotes are stored in the balls.
All of those are replicated to all servers.
Posts and comments are federated (synchronised). Upvotes are actually a bit of a fudge, they are actually ‘Favourites’ if considered from an activity pub (e.g. Mastodon) perspective, and yes favourites are also federated.
Downvotes don’t exist in activity pub and, as a result, they do not federate between instances.
At least that is my understanding.
Downvotes do federate, but it uses protocol extensions to do it. So the downvotes won't federate to Mastodon, but it does for Lemmy and I think Kbin too
Votes federate with standard Like and Dislike activities which are part of Activitypub. It’s just that some platforms like Mastodon can’t handle Dislikes.
Honestly votes being federated seems like a bad idea imo. Would be easy to spin up an instance with thousands of fake users and manipulate posts.
Fediverse is already big enough that it could be lucrative to do so.
So then everyone just blacklists that instance. If the problem is really severe, we move to whitelisting.
It’s not hard to identify when someone is doing this.
It’s not hard to identify if you’re looking for it, they just use one instance, they aren’t subtle about it, and they are only boosting a specific company instead of a variety of products and ideas.
Vote manipulation is hard enough to detect on Reddit where they have visibility top to bottom. I think this will become a major issue in the future.
This is on top of the already significant scaling issues votes are causing.
Other instances can cache the total count for historical reasons, to preserve lost instance vote counts, but keeping the full ledger is going to be a serious barrier to entry for hosters and a security (manipulation) issue.
A whitelist defeats the decentralisation and openness of a defederated system.
I think you’re mistaken in your assumption it would be easy to identify malicious instances. Bots are notoriously difficult to fight, every time you block one method another workaround will appear.
I think you’re mistaken in your assumption it would be easy to identify malicious instances. Bots are notoriously difficult to fight, every time you block one method another workaround will appear.
I run a large instance and I look around in the DB occasionally when users complain, so I’m pretty familiar with what’s in there.
A whitelist defeats the decentralisation and openness of a defederated system.
True, but assholes are assholes and sometimes freedom and assholery don’t mix well.
Would it change anything besides their technique?
They almost certainly already have vote manipulation tools for reddit that work via browser automation, because someone offered me money to build one 10 years ago.
Those tools and a handful of accounts+vpns would already be borderline undetectable without the access needed to see that 25 accounts always voted the same way.
At least on Lemmy, you have that access. Reddit not only makes zero effort to prevent it, they actively obfuscate the information needed to spot it.
I disagree. Reddit openly admitted to manipulating its upvote count to “deter bots”, especially since it became apparent that the front page of reddit became a very lucrative position to be if you were promoting a product, service, or ideology. In the post API world of Reddit, it’s more apparent than ever that votes are being manipulated to give users an illusion of activity that isn’t actually there.
In fact, Reddit’s manipulation was always as easy as paying someone to upvote a post a few hundred times within an hour of posting which in turn boosted it on the algorithm that displayed leading posts based on rate of activity instead of actual upvotes.
On the fediverse, being on the front page of an instance isn’t nearly as lucrative, and being on the front of ALL of them isn’t feasible. Even if one instance is manipulated, federation makes that effort null in seconds.
The fact these services aren’t monetised, are volunteer-funded, and don’t have the economic or advertising power as reddit does, really makes it harder for votes to be manipulated, let alone make someone want to manipulate the service.
Lemmy and Mastodon have issues with moderation but at worst the manipulation risk is nowhere near as bad as reddit. At best, it looks like corporate manipulation of social media is all but nonexistent on here. Let’s celebrate that
Technically votes are public. Only UI is hiding them. Which should be resolved, one way or another.
Edit: there was a post with that here a few weeks ago. I understand that this isn’t a real answer to your question. Maybe you find it with these hints.
Edit2: Found it. Here you’ll find more. https://mylemmy.win/post/89871
Meaning admins are purposefully allowing other people to brigade others with alts.
Lemmy fucking blows.
Lemmy admins can see who is using alts to brigade others and ban them, yet they clearly don’t. They allow all kinds of skeevy bullshit from everyone – it took months of pressure to get them to even do so much as ban obvious problem instances like Hexbear.
They do it because they are selfish assholes who only care about power, and everyone just accepted they’re the dominant class in our little society here and that the big name instances like .world and .ml are perfectly fine with controlling the majority of content on the platform. It was never what was intended for federation in the first place, yet here we are.
Lemmy sucks as a platform because it’s not programmed to circumvent people’s base animalistic hierarchial nature and that is its problem.
The platform should automatically track for obvious alt and bot accounts and ban them.
It really should have a toggable hate filter that automatically bans people for using certain hate terms.
Accounts need to be tied to user machines so bans are actually halfway enforceable.
The platform shouldn’t really require mods or admins; an AI should monitor interactions and stop arguing or antagonistic encounters outright.
The admins should be acting fairly and impartially.
But none of that is happening because no admin is participating in good faith, they’re just looking to ensure they can do what they want without consequences, and so are the mods who have claimed almost every old subreddit name across instances under a few select usernames so they could have power over others and win confrontations.
And people can get away with power tripping because the platform wasn’t designed to take the fact that people do that into account. Any platform or social system that is not built on the first principle that humanity is inherently evil is bound to fail, and look what happened here. Perfect example.
