I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms.
But how much trust can we place into Lemmy, Mastodon, and/or other various integrated Fediverse platform instances?
I’m all for open-source and transparency which the devs seem to provide, although providing source code and routinely audited source code are entirely different concepts.
Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.
So I ask simply: How much faith do you have? (Please provide supporting documentation links supporting your answer because I’m genuinely interested.)
EDIT: I literally removed a semi-colon character ‘:’
That’s ultimately just the Internet being the Internet.
On the fediverse, any instance shouldn’t blindly trust any other instance for that exact reason. That’s part of the game. Instances share the data over ActivityPub, and it’s up to you to process and make use of that data. That includes spam filtering and whatnot. Some instances have CSAM detection for example.
Every instance that’s subscribed to a user or community gets the full set of data: every vote, from every user, from every instance involved. We have the data, we can analyze it. And that’s what really matters.
It doesn’t matter if there’s rogue instances trying to manipulate votes. Everyone have the data to detect and filter out the noise. Maybe one day it’ll be like E-Mail where the majority of the traffic is spam. But just like E-Mail, we’ll make filters and make it work. If all else fails, there’s always the allowlist method: only see content from sources you trust not be spammy. You can even run AI models on it to filter the data if you want. You have the data, you can do whatever you want with it to make it useful for you.
I have faith in the protocol and its openness, not the software that runs it.