After extensive review of the conversation, I believe that it has run its course, and has degraded beyond any fruitful discussion. We need a cooldown.
I will say this on the matter: making an accusation against someone for not saying something is not, in fact, proof of complicity. You cannot prove a negative that way, and Russell's Teapot would suggest the burden of proof is on you, the one making the accusation. Otherwise, this is just Glenn Beck-style "Why do you think they're saying anything? I'm just asking questions" discourse, which is disingenuous.
10 votes within a minute of each other is probably normal. 10 votes all at once, or microseconds of each other, is statistically less likely to happen.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but it seems like it's mathematically possible to set some kind of threshold? If a set percent of users from an instance are all interacting microseconds from each other on one post locally, that ought to trigger a flag.
Not all instances advertise their user counts accurately, but they're nevertheless reflected through a NodeInfo endpoint.
I agree, but it's also worth keeping in mind that a bot swarm approach could be much more distributed. There used to be a guy on the Fediverse that set up "relay accounts" on many, many instances with public signups, prior to hooking them all together with a single app and making them spit out torrential fountains of garbage.
It is 100% possible to abuse other people's public services to make remediation more complicated. Blocking a bad instance or a series of bad instances is easy. Dealing with a run-away spam problem from dozens of friendly servers is way harder.
Honestly, thank you for demonstrating a clear limitation of how things currently work. Lemmy (and Kbin) probably should look into internal rate limiting on posts to avoid this.
I'm a bit naive on the subject, but perhaps there's a way to detect "over x amount of votes from over x amount of users from this instance"? and basically invalidate them?
I'm honestly really excited about it! I've largely been hanging out on Codeberg - it's a great service, but it feels relatively small when it comes to finding projects to follow and support. I really look forward to the day that I can just easily keep tabs on the code repos of fediverse platforms I care about.
Thanks! 😁 The interviews are probably my favorite thing to put up, at the moment. I'm hoping to cover all the major projects, but there's a lot of projects at this point.
I really wish this was standardized more across instances. The fediverse is extremely large, but a lot of servers end up being paid for solely by whoever runs them.
I get that not everybody can afford it, but...a few bucks a month to supporting a server goes a long way.
I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to have some platforms be specialized around really particular kinds of activities, but I have like 7 different accounts floating around. It's tiring. I'd really just prefer a good generalist platform and a handful of different apps that all hook into the same account.
That being said, I don't mind the concept of following someone's Pixelfed to see their neat photography pics, or another person's PeerTube to watch their videos. In fact, if my hypothetical server can interoperate with them without any major issues, I'd consider that a win for me.
You know, every time I've tried to take a look at Solid's protocol, I find myself struggling to understand what they're actually trying to do, or how any of it is supposed to work.
I've tried to read the protocol spec several times, and my brain just kind of melts. From their About page for the Solid project, I kind of get what they're talking about, but so much of the under-the-hood stuff feels really vague.
I'm not against making a fediverse platform support Solid, if only to support the core concepts its promoting, but I feel like they have a lot of work to do to make their own project more accessible to people.
These are 100% real. Many of them require hardware augmentation to handle HTTPS traffic, but they all work.