Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Even beyond general brigading, there’s the potential for correlating ALT-accounts that may reflect different philosophies than their main account.
All this is possible by admins in other social media, like Reddit, but I believe that many people consider the risk/reward and probably speculate that Reddit has internal controls to prevent this type of abuse. The Fediverse doesn’t have those controls. Anybody in the world can be an admin.
The ultimate and fundamental protection against this is that companies want people to use their products, while tribalists want to chase their opposition off the platforms they’re conquering/controlling, which becomes a problem on a no-profit, no-barrier-to-entry federated platform.
This obviously means that ideologically charged instances have a lot of power and access, and very little accountability.
Malicious users are already able to brigade/harass even just with frontend access on traditional social media, that can only be worse on federated platforms where they may gain admin access.
That being said, I’m here because I’m curious to see how this platform will evolve and face these challenges.