this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 358 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (51 children)

This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

May I ask how do you format your text? My format bar has disappeared from wefwef.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't use wefwef, I use jerboa for android.

**bold**

*italics*

> quote

`code`

# heading

- list

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ah ok. Yeah I thought the markdown was the same as reddit being markdown but it used to have a toolbar.

Thanks for response.

Also I’ve wondered why don’t they have an underline markdown.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fun fact: old reddit used to use one of the header functions as an underline. I think it was 5x # that did it. However, this was an unofficial implementation of markdown, and it was discarded with new reddit. Also, being a header function you could only apply it to an entire line or paragraph, rather than individual words.

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