Any implementation is of course free to use a reputation system, but it seems hard to implement. You don't necessarily know all the votes a remote user has received. Say you get a vote to a post from a user who you've never heard about before. But actually this user is a well-respected member of their own instance and has been on that instance for years. Meanwhile, your instance believes this is an inactive spammer or new account or something.

[–] fiddlesticks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't you have the main instance take care of it? I don't exactly know how activitypub handles votes but if they're reported back to the users home instance it could be calculated there.

For example if I had a reputation of 12 and I posted on a different instance and got enough votes to get 1 extra reputation those votes would be reported back to my instance which would update my rep accordingly.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But how would I, an external instance, know your true reputation? Would I need to ask your home instance and just trust that? So when I ask "what level of trust should I put in this user", a malicious instance could just say "a million reputation points" and I just need to trust that? I don't see how this is going to work.

[–] fiddlesticks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah that's fair, but without some form of centralization I don't see how you establish trust. Unless you have every instance scan every users history but that would be pretty inefficient