I wonder if an instance could only allow votes by users who are part of instances that require email verification or some other verification method. I would imagine that would heavily help reduce vote manipulation on that particular instance.
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This alone wouldn't help because I can just set up an instance that requires email verification (or any other kind) and automate it still since I can make infinite emails with my own domain.
What is the definition of a "fake account"?
In this context it would be an account with the sole purpose of boosting the visible popularity of a post or comment.
Votes are just a number that determine what everybody sees. This will be manipulated by all the bad actors of this world once Lemmy becomes mainstream. Politicians, dictators, Hollywood, tech companies....
If we stop spam accounts from brand new or low usage servers those could both be easily mailed (emulated activity, pre-create instances and let them marinate)
I don't know much about how making new instances works, but could someone create instances in large qualities with smaller populations with the goal of giving human moderators too much work to defederate them all?
There are legitimate reasons for creating a “low-usage” server to host your personal account, so you have full control over federating etc.
If we start assuming all small instances are spam by default, we’ll end up like email now—where it’s practically impossible for small sites to run their own mail servers without getting a corporate stamp of approval from Google.