this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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A common way I've heard it explained is to think of it like email. Say someone creates a gmail account and their friend creates a hotmail account. The gmail user doesn't need to create a hotmail account to send them a message, they just log into their gmail account and send their message to friend@hotmail and the magic of email takes care of the rest.
The fediverse works similarly. You create an account on one "instance" and can interact with pretty much every other instance. There's some nuance to it since it's more complicated than email, but that's the gist of it.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
Do upvotes and downvotes federate similarly? If so, how does the protocol prevent vote rigging?
I just upvoted you and saw the vote increase on two remote instances.
The instances don't seem to agree on your vote count, but both I was watching increased by one shortly after I upvoted you from beehaw.
Yes, looking at the docs linked from a sibling comment I see that upvotes and downvotes are part of the protocol, which is good to see. To prevent vote stuffing however, it does seem that all instances will have a database of upvotes and downvotes and who did them. They were never really secret anyway but it's interesting that any server can see this, it'll be an interesting development to be able to track vote brigading.
There's a bit of technical explanation in the Lemmy Docs here. I haven't looked into it at all but if you're interested, that seems to be a good starting point.