I wanted to provide a brief analysis of the top comments on blahaj lemmy and compared to lemmy world (who defederated from hexbear preemptively). The red comments favored federation and the blue ones favored defederation.
Initially I was browsing Blahaj Lemmy and couldn’t believe how many top comments favored federation.
When I started browsing from Lemmy World (who preemptively defederated) the top comments were way more favorable to defederation. On the top comment, it looks like 50 upvotes (more than half) came from hexbear users.
Whether intentional or not, this is brigading. I’m happy that they’re defederated. I really don’t think that individual/local blocking is good enough since this has the ability to steer the direction of a lot of discourse, and I’d just not see it, but it would affect our instance the same. The effects of brigading still happen. I’d still see the same number of upvotes that would imply sentiment different to the actual users of the instance.
Also, is there any proper way to see where upvotes come from? I feel like this would be a good tool to vet botting, trolling and brigading. Also instance only communities (though I’m on lemmy.ca rn lmao) would be good.
There’s something I’m curious about here: Blahaj has downvotes disabled while .world does not. While I don’t exactly have the best idea how federation works in this case, downvotes from .world users would likely be counted in your comparison (and .world being the largest instance I assume a fair few people would’ve stumbled across that thread and went voting), I assume that must have some sort of an effect.
I wonder if the view from another instance has both preemptively defederated from Hexbear and has downvotes disabled (Beehaw, maybe?) would look any different.
AFAIK you can tell exactly who voted what if you have database access.
Yeah I did look from my beehaw account and it’s still like the lemmy.world view. From lemm.ee (not defed) it looks like the blahaj view.
Alsoo afaict the down votes are only disabled visually, the api still works so you can downvote if browsing e.g. from a third party client
Even then, they’re not taken in to account with the ranking algorithms
Sometimes I’ve accidentally not swiped far enough while using Voyager, and it downvotes instead of going back. I’ve always got an error about the downvote not registering and assumed it was because it’s disabled on the instance.
Same on Memmy. I’m assuming both just haven’t coded for the button itself to be hidden based on your signed in instance.