I banned someone from a community I made for breaking a rule and being excessively rude, then they DM’d me and after a report their account got banned and I think that they might’ve made an alternative account and have been downvoting/disliking all of my posts. What can I do to stop/fix this, is there a way for me to see activity on my community as a moderator? Sorry if this doesn’t fit here, I don’t really know where else to ask this question. It’s a small community so any post I make will get buried when the moment I make the post it gets downvoted.
I haven’t ruled out that this could just be coincidence but if I can do something about it I’d rather know.
Edit: Maybe a feature request to consider in the future is allowing the user to see activity on their posts, that way if they do notice a trend they can deal with it personally (ie block the user responsible). It’s a feature available on other social platforms and seeing as Lemmy logs that stuff anyways. I dunno it just seems like a nice to have. Food for thought I guess.
There have been other reports of this recently:
Downvotes on kbin are public, but kbin doesn’t federate downvotes from Lemmy so unless the stalker(s) are on kbin you can’t see them yourself. You profile on kbin looks significantly cleaner than your Lemmy profile… so it doesn’t tell us much.
Votes in Lemmy’s DB are also not anonymous, so instance admins (or people who run their own instance) could investigate this with direct db queries… it’s not exposed via any user-facing API. If you think you’re being stalked by a group of sock-puppeted mass-downvote accounts, you could contact the admins via one of the mechanisms listed at https://mastodon.world/about. The email there points to a ticketing system used by the admins I think. Of course, they may be too busy to investigate, but they also may be interested in banning sock-puppets before it gets out of hand.
That’s really weird actually… I’m browsing my posts both here on Lemmy and on Kbin and there’s a serious discrepancy between the two like take this very post for example, on Kbin I see 25up and 6down whereas on Lemmy I see 26up and 19down. The upvote difference I think is attributed to the fact that Lemmy give you 1up by default and from the looks of things, Kbin doesn’t. What I don’t understand is the difference in downvotes, there’s 13down that aren’t being accounted for on Kbin, I wonder why… 🤔 And it’s not just this post, it’s a lot of my posts, one I made on the Mass Effect community has 17up and 1down on Lemmy and on Kbin it’s sitting at 1up and 0down also of note, the amount of comments is off, Kbin has 14 and Lemmy has 18. Very odd. I presume if it’s happening to me, then it’s probably happening to others as well.
- Kbin doesn’t federate downvotes from Lemmy, and I believe it has a smaller user population than Lemmy (or at least one that generates fewer total downvotes). So you’d expect downvote counts to be wildly different.
- On upvote counts, federation is just real flaky right now. I don’t have GitHub issue links handy, but there are several major issues detailing posts, comments, and votes Federating unreliably. You can pretty easily extrapolate that to expect vote counts to vary by 20%-60% from server to server depending on how many federation messages a particular server decided to drop on the floor on any given day.
Lemmy is pretty cool, but it’s a lot rough around the edges right now. It’s improving fast, but if you break out the magnifying glass, you’re gonna find problems.
