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.
Right, thanks. I clarified the title of the post a bit.
What about users on my own instance? There are 50ish users now. I personally know about 30 of them and the other 20 are random sign ups, can a sign up use the api to downvote on another instance when I have downvotes disabled on my own is my question?
I'm not really a developer but I will try and put it into activitypub words I just looked up at w3, can an actor from my instance vegantheoryclub.org use the api to do a downvote activity on a community on another instance