Yes, that’s happened before. They were sending a very large number of votes, so it was immediately obvious. Even a couple dozen from an unknown instance will be noticed, when an admin sees it and says “huh I haven’t heard of that instance” and when they look there’s nothing there.
Comment on You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoA malicious hosting server could use fake points to blast any message to the top of everyone’s feeds until manually banned or defederated
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 days ago
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
I’m not sure how giving every server access to the votes solves that.
The malicious server can make fake users to pump up votes. your server admin has to notice, then check the vote logs, then see what’s happening and defederate them. That’s pretty much what you described in your scenario, anyways.
Die4Ever@programming.dev 4 days ago
It’s way easier to notice and defed when you can see these fake usernames
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
But it also has to be defended separately by the admin of every server that has a user subbed to that community. Seems like a large burden to put on small-mid instance admins.
I’d be surprised if my server admin was really paying attention that closely to votes on communities I’m subbed to, right?
I have to admit I don’t know the view that admins get of how their server intersects the fediverse.