Instances are more like servers or domains. Your instance is lemmy.world. We can see votes from individual users because votes to federate across instances, (like if you, on lemmy.world, were to vote on my instance, lemmy.dbzer0). In order for that federation to happen, the votes must be public. So anyone with the know-how can inspect who has voted on posts, and how they have voted.
Someone spun up three entire instances and mass created dozens of accounts on each, just to mass downvote. It’s just blatant vote manipulation, and is why the admin stepped in to defederate (stop sending info back and forth) from the rogue instances.
You see stuff like that occasionally from the “tankie triad” instances, (lemmy.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmygrad) but they’re usually more subtle about it to avoid instantly getting defederated.
I’m new here and still grasping the way the fediverse works.
Is this basically saying 3 user accounts were made for the mass downvoting or what’s happening?
Instances are more like servers or domains. Your instance is lemmy.world. We can see votes from individual users because votes to federate across instances, (like if you, on lemmy.world, were to vote on my instance, lemmy.dbzer0). In order for that federation to happen, the votes must be public. So anyone with the know-how can inspect who has voted on posts, and how they have voted.
Someone spun up three entire instances and mass created dozens of accounts on each, just to mass downvote. It’s just blatant vote manipulation, and is why the admin stepped in to defederate (stop sending info back and forth) from the rogue instances.
You see stuff like that occasionally from the “tankie triad” instances, (lemmy.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmygrad) but they’re usually more subtle about it to avoid instantly getting defederated.
Little bit more.
Someone made 3 servers, then a bunch of accounts on those servers, then used all of those accounts to downvote.
Allegedly because I ain’t got the time to manually verify that myself.
Thanks for the elaborating.
Servers, not users. Though each server would have users.
Although I don’t think they’re bots like the post is implying. OP just spends a lot of time annoying them.
What do people said, but since you’re new, here’s a recap post on what the whole Tankie situation is about (if you didn’t encounter them on Reddit lol