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Cake day: March 18th, 2025

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  • I care about that far less than I care about not having every vote I cast recorded forever by anyone subscribed to the fediverse feed.

    Well I think there’s a good argument that account vote history should disappear after X months anyway, as after that long it becomes worthless anyway. Which is how Piefed currently works by the way.

    At the end of the day, brigading is mostly an ego thing anyway. If you just stop caring about votes then they can’t hurt you.

    It’s not though. Brigading or just a small number of committed chronic downvoters can throttle the spread of a post. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up as they can successfully bury threads. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee community and when I banned them (about 5 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and they had no contribution to their names. Some of the accounts in question literally had no posting history. These accounts just existed to downvote.

    Having votes be public doesn’t actually fix the astroturfing problem anyway since it’s still possible to just create sockpuppet accounts anyway.

    Which are all visible publicly and can get banned, and in this case, get instance banned - not just community banned. It doesn’t stop it from ever happening, but it’s more likely you will get banned for that behaviour.
























  • As a sidenote, I remember that UK has an odd and ancient “law” stating something in the lines “” (i.e. being anti-monarchy and advocating for the end of monarchy, even without any violent language/means but a pacific defense of anti-monarchy). I couldn’t find it, nor I can remember the exact phrasing, but such a “law” threatens prison time for those who “dare” to “offend” the crowniness of UK Crown. Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.

    Given there’s an active pro-republican campaign site I’d wager not at all.

    If countries are capable of passing draconian laws against their own citizens, don’t expect that those same countries couldn’t go further to impose these laws beyond their own lawns, especially in times of interconnectedness.

    UK against the USA? I think the UK isn’t winning that.