The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
Fwiw, search engines need to figure out what is “reliable”. The original implementations were, well if BananaPie.com is referenced by 10% of the web, it must be super trustworthy! So people created huge networks of websites that all linked each other and a website they wanted to promote in order to gain reliability.