Title. I have seen this issue in the past, but I just stumbled across a post where the difference is massive (as of today, 14 January 2024):
316 upvotes and 173 comments on lemmy.sh.itjust.works
vs
-13 upvotes and 7 comments on lemmy.zip
for no apparent reason (i.e. lemmy.zip doesn’t seem to be blocking the instances the missing comments are coming from and those instances aren’t blocking lemmy.zip either). What’s going on here?
Is the issue solved as of today?
P.S. Here’s how the post appears on other instances
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The first link is post from fediverse@lemmy.world, the second link is post from fediverse@lemmy.ml, it’s a same post crossposted to communities under different instance.
This. It’s not the same post, it’s two different posts in two different communities.
I have no expertise in how ActivityPub works, but my guess is it works something like this:
You make a post on instance A, you can view it on instance B. People all over the fediverse, instances C through Z are voting on your post.
The venn diagram of other instances with which instance A and instance B federate overlap but are not exactly the same. There are instances federated with instance A not visible to instance B, there are instances federated with instance B not visible to instance A.
The vote count for a post is counted by instance A and B based on which instances with which they federate. That means instance A is counting votes from instances that B cannot see, and instance B is counting votes from instances that A cannot see.
Where the Venn diagrams overlap, both instances will agree on the vote count. But the vote counts coming from instances that they don’t both federate with will cause a difference in vote count.
Really feels like the disjointed and manipulatable nature of voting across Lemmy is going to become more of a problem as more instance admins learn how to abuse it. There are already popular instances that won’t federate downvotes, and that has the effect of making the scores on their instance appear higher overall, which in turn makes it look more active, as well as manipulating the front page content in a non-democratic fashion.
This lack of a shared reality with the scores is going to hamper lemmy as a reddit alternative if there isn’t some kind of standard or attempt to foster a “true score” across all instances.
No, not really. You should keep in mind that the vote scores on Reddit and other similar forums are fake scores as well. All forms of online voting are fake to some degree.
Reddit also does various manipulations during vote counting prior to showing you a score. For example, they may not count scores from accounts that are too new or has too little other activity, in order to avoid scores manipulated by sock puppet accounts. And it is entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Elon Musk directly controls the vote count on X/Twitter posts to his liking.
So I don’t think voting is really all that important anyway. It may be important on centralized websites like Reddit, but it has always been something of a lie. It is just that on a federated forum the lie becomes more obvious.
Personally, I never take voting on the fediverse seriously, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I mean, I do upvote, but I use it more as an acknowledgement, more than a means to try to boost someone’s comment over others.
A locked thread from 3 months ago that has been crossposted in to half a dozen groups isn’t the best example of how replies and comments federate across the fediverse.
AFAIK its “by design” meaning an inherent property of the fediverse.
If I dont follow someone or my instance isnt federated with those of other followers we cant see each others comments or likes etc