this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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The nice things about the Federated universe is that, yes, you can bulk create user accounts on your own instance - and that server can then be defederated by other servers when it becomes obvious that it's going to create problems.
It's not a perfect fix and as this post demonstrated, is only really effective after a problem has been identified. At least in terms of vote manipulation from across servers, it could act if it, say, detects that 99% of new upvotes are coming from a server created yesterday with 1 post, it could at least flag it for a human to review.
One other thing is that you can bulk create your own instances, and that's a lot more effort to defederate. People could be creating those instances right now and just start using them after a year; at least they have incurred some costs during that..
I believe abuse management in openly federated systems (e.g. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix) is still an unsolved problem. I doubt good solutions will arrive before they become popular enough to attract commercial spammers.
Well if all the upvotes are coming from tiny instances, that'd be a good indicator. You can't stop it entirely, but you can at least make it a lot harder. I do wish that instances could've been somewhat more "randomly" assigned to new users, as that would make any bias in voting sources a huge and obvious red flag.