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.
Yes. If you want to block this, you either have to edit the source code or, at the load balancer/reverse proxy, block
/api/v3/comment/like
if the POST body's JSON content containslike
with value-1
.I found someone who is more familiar with programming than I am and we tested this. If downvotes are disabled posting -1 fails. Good news for me! Thanks for clarifying for me what I needed to be looking at
Huh, last time I checked that didn't work. Guess they must've fixed it at some point! Good to know!