I want to make signing up to my instance as unattractive to bots and vote manipulation as possible. If I could turn off all voting on Lemmy I absolutely would. I think activitypub votes are spam and just because reddit used them doesn’t mean that it should be required. I used forums and other websites for a long time before Reddit even existed without voting and my time with Reddit and now Lemmy has left me unconvinced that it is worth while. I think engagement with comments is the only thing worth anything on this platform and some day I’d like to see a sorting algorithm that only took traffic and comments into account for scoring.
Anyway, I try my best to review the users who sign up and the comments that are made to my instance. I typically deny new applicants with disposable email addresses as well.
But there are some accounts that were created that have no activity that I can see easily from lemmy-ui and I’m not really at the point where I am reviewing SQL database. I want to confirm disabling downvotes at least prevented that kind of bot activity and I was wondering if there is anything else I can be doing? I can see how upvoting fascist and western centric points of view can also be problematic by boosting a state actor’s propaganda in a mirror of downvotes silencing minority views.
they can downvote if their instance is federated with yours, the downvotes won’t federate though and will only be seen by users on the same instance.
look at some hexbear posts from lemmy.ml and lemm.ee for instance.
Woops read this the wrong way around. No they can’t at least not with the UI. Look at any lemm.ml or lemm.ee post from hexbear.
I had someone test this out, if you use the API on vegantheoryclub and try to post a -1 activitypub like activity it fails. This is good for me because I was concerned bots would sign up and be silently downvoting things on other instance communities without me being able to tell.