So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.
Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.
Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL
All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.
On a fundamental level, this “choose your voters” thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user’s knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.
There’s just so many avenues for abuse here, and it’s disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.
It’s a fundamental property of the federated system. The devs need to acknowledge it the same way you need to acknowledge that people can lie. It’s a fact, there is no easy way around it and everyone knows it.
They could always federate an aggregate statistic instead of one that discourages involvement. Then we could acknowledge both federation and the lie!