While I obviously support and use lemmy:
You DO realize that lemmy has even fewer protections against bots and no vetting of instance owners (or even mods on those instances), at all, right? The big difference is that there won’t be a news post about “special interests” controlling discourse on here.
And a distressing number of tankies in many prominent instances.
If instance owners do not want to vet their users behavior if other instances speak up, the instance that is misbehaving gets defederated from the rest. That’s the power of federated services.
And all of that is super easy to detect and assumes that the majority of major instance owners are actively fighting this. Just like how free market capitalism ensures everyone is happy and satisfied.
This is not a simple problem to solve. It was a problem in the days of message boards, a problem in the days of digg/reddit, and is still a problem today.
Understand the risks and dangers of what you use rather than just assuming things will be ideologically pure.
Further, since instance owners are just a username…
If my good admin got black bagged and replaced by someone else with access to her accounts… How long would it be before I noticed? What if she was pressured or threatened with death if she didn’t comply? Many ways to ruin otherwise good people.
Hell. How do you know they were ever “good” to begin with? We have seen an increasing trend in long cons in open source projects and social media and the like.
Especially when most discourse is largely indistinguishable from AI anyway. Just make a vague non sequitor that aligns with the politics of the audience and everyone cheers.
I disagree. While small bot attacks won’t ever be detected, a large-scale manipulation of votes would be obvious and easily countered
