Asklemmy

44147 readers

1280 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Attack scenario: vote brigading. How granular is a server’s control of federation/moderation? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 2 years ago by phase_change to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So, in thinking about how bad actors might manipulate Lemmy, I have some questions.

In this scenario, I’m an entity that wants to influence social media, a government, a corporation, a collection of dedicated degenerates—pick your boojum. I see this growing Lemmy thing. I figure it’s not a serious threat, but if I’m wrong, I’d like to be placed to influence things via what people see. I want to be able to upvote or downvote posts.

If I’ve got a decent budget, I’d spin up a bunch of new Lemmy instances and encourage signups when there’s this mad rush from Reddit. I’d want as many real users as I can get. I’d also create a bunch of sock puppet accounts on all of my instances. I’d probably have some of them post and comment.

If Lemmy attains critical mass, I’d be able to use those sock puppets to upvote/downvote posts I want to influence.

I (now the OP, not the hypothetical bad actor) imagine this is hard to defend against. I also imagine federation is all or nothing. That is, either you federate everything from a server or you federate nothing.

Are their granular federation options, like allowing post federation but ignoring upvote/downvote federation?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] phase_change 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

That’s my guess too if Lemmy takes off. I’d imagine some will be obvious enough that everyone defedrates from that server, stranding the legit users. I’m not sophisticated enough to know how to defend against this, but I’m intrigued by the concept.