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.
ActivityPub can be extend - and new things can be added.
Removing things that are agreed upon from it is a breaking change for the Fediverse. Removing Likes (and Dislikes) breaks Mastodon, Kbin, PeerTube and so on.
You can spin up Lemmy instances that ignore votes or don’t federate them out - but you cannot remove Likes or Dislikes from the spec because they have meaning elsewhere.
If you do feel strongly about removing Like and Dislike from the spec - the spec is maintained at https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams
Yeah, it would break all those things for which votes provide no benefit. They should be broken.
There isn’t any use for votes on a platform that isn’t using them to automatically rank content for the purposes of profit.
Running a voteless instance of one of those does no good because the problem is structural. Votes aren’t secure and their whole purpose is to manipulate what content gets shown to users. People using the votes to make something get shown (or not) isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The existence of a system that ranks content according to votes changes how people behave on the platform. Spinning up an instance that just doesn’t allow or show votes doesn’t change the problem that all the content is produced using the vote system and reflects it.
The Fediverse and ActivityPub existed before Lemmy - and Lemmy is but a small fraction of the userbase of the Fediverse. Other applications using the protocol use boosts for the equivalent of retweets and similar. Want to go to an event in Mobilizon? That’s a like. Boost a toot? That’s a like. Say “I want to read that book?” That’s a like. They’re using it without issue.
The issues you have appear to be issues with design choices in Lemmy for how the system is set up and how content is ranked. If that is an issue, then its an issue with Lemmy - not ActivityPub.
However, votes - in the form of likes and dislikes are part of the core parts of the ActivityPub protocol and trying to say they should be removed is not likely to go anywhere further than {{insert “old man shouts at cloud”}}.
As to “votes aren’t secure” - this is again, by design and inherent in any federated system.
If you are going to argue that a federated system shouldn’t have likes, that is again an issue of the application and its design choices - not the protocol. The protocol says nothing about how something should be rendered - be it votes or ranking.
I would be very surprised if you were to make any headway on having Likes and Dislikes removed from ActivityPub - if you do please link the issue where you make that argument in the GitHub repo for ActivityStreams so that I can watch it.
Yeah I know there’s votes on stuff other than lemmy. There shouldn’t be for all the reasons I keep saying. What some other platforms use votes as a stand in for (except for maybe mobilizon, idk much about that one) are weird hacks like the boost/rt implementation or shouldn’t exist.
I’m talking about it at the protocol level because you took it there and because without a for profit content mill votes serve no purpose.
If votes not being secure isn’t a problem then why does it blow up like crazy every time someone makes a post about it? Also, it’s obviously a huge problem. Minimizing it by saying it’s just part of any federated system just sounds crazy.
My overarching point is that the structure informs and defines the function and when there’s a structural reenforcement to karma farming, vote laundering and general shitty Reddit (or twitter) style behavior the solution is to remove that part of the structure.
It should come as no surprise to you that I’m not gonna go off half cocked on git about this. I’m well aware that it sounds like primo old man yelling at clouds. The only reason I’m talking to you about it is in the hope that other people see the conversation and go “damn, it sounds weird but he’s cookin’”.
Once enough people realize that noncommercial social media has a different form than it’s predecessors there’s an actual chance that some fundamental change to activitypub could happen. That mr smith goes to Washington stuff never worked.