The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
I don’t have experience with systems like this, but just as sort of a fusion of a lot of ideas I’ve read in this thread, could some sort of per-instance trust system work?
The more any instance interacts positively (posting, commenting, etc.) with main instance ‘A,’ that particular instance’s reputation score gets bumped up on main instance A. Then, use that score with the ratio of votes from that instance to the total amount of votes in some function in order to determine the value of each vote cast.
This probably isn’t coherent, but I just woke up, and I also have no idea what I’m talking about.
Something like that already happened on Mastodon! Admins got together and marked instances as “bad”. They made a list. And after a few months, everything went back to normal. This kind of self organization is normal on the fediverse.
I believe db0 is working on something like this to help combat the eventual waves of spam and stuff were going to see.