I’ve not studied the ActivityPub protocol much, and certainly not examined the voting API. My question for those who have:
Is it possible or easy for a platform to suppress downvotes from users who have not first satisfied either of these preconditions:
- created a comment in the thread being downvoted; OR
- upvoted a comment in the thread being downvoted
?
And perhaps more complex, cancel the downvotes of cheaters who would circumvent the above policy by making a temporary dummy comment, downvoting, then deleting the dummy.
Voting is a shit-show on Lemmy. I wonder to what extent the ActivityPub API is the culprit or if it’s an implementation specific problem.