this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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So we wanna defederate to steer votes in a certain way? Worrying so much about votes is such redditor behavior.
I would challenge you to think about how votes can influence the culture of a community.
You're correct in that worrying about how many upvotes you can accumulate is very reddit.
I'm not really talking about karma accumulation, but rather the way votes can influence visibility of comments. When done methodically, this promotes some ideas over others, and presents an illusion that "everyone else thinks so". This is a very, very powerful way to influence a community.
We are hard wired to absorb the opinions of those around us. Sure you can disagree with other group members, but even that is an acknowledgement that the alternative perspective you're disagreeing with is a popular one.
You could absolutely influence people's opinions on lemmy just with a hacked instance that manipulated votes on comments by just a few dozen points.
You make valid points. Apologies for the Reddit accusation.
But the one thing that comes to mind is that this kind of Communist, like in lemmy.ml, is not big enough to cause this sway.
Sure, the instance is massive, but most users don't hold those same beliefs. Most people go to it as the "default" instance. So I really don't think they have the numbers to cause this issue.
Sure. This thread is talking about lemmy.ml, but I'm talking about the current state of the lemmyverse.
I've posted this elsewhere in this thread but my unpopular opinion is that federation by default is not sustainable.
Presently admins federate with everyone and blacklist those which are problematic.
It's inevitable that in the near future someone with a rudimentary understanding of hosting will be able to spin up a dozen instances, each with a few thousand bot accounts, intent on upvoting every "genocide Joe biden" comment.
The fediverse will shatter. Admins will realise they need policies to guide their own moderation, and acknowledge that they can only federate with specific instances with compatible moderation.
So instead of blacklisting bad instances, you need to change to whitelisting good ones.