That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.
I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.
That would require each subscribing instance to report its number of local subscribers to the instance hosting the community, which would then add up the numbers and report the total back to the subscribers. That seems like it would be easy to manipulate, where one malicious instance could misreport local subscriber numbers to change the apparent relative popularities of different communities throughout the fediverse.
I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.