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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Wouldn't be that hard to archive and validate your posts and it's so easy on lemmy to leave a bad instance.
That... doesn't really answer the question. So it's relatively easy to leave, but how would you know that you needed to in the first place?
If the voting of posts on an instance were being manipulated, or the visibility of certain sources or users, or if commercial influences were affecting administrative decisions or moderator behavior, how would you know?
How do you discover that you are in a bubble? That the information being presented to you is intentionally skewed in order to project a narrative?
How do you exit Plato's cave if you don't know that you are in it?
By having an external source of truth to compare against. In this case you could spin up your own instance, and as a mod you could see where all the votes were coming from, so you could simulate having the same set of defederations as some other instance. Anything that does not match up then warrants further examination.
People did something similar and found that lemmy.ml was modifying its internal database logs - though it was claimed that it was merely due to the newest software release that it alone was running at the time, before it got rolled out to become public. I never followed through on that further.
That's all somewhat expensive to do, but basically if you run your own instance then you have total control. (Even then, you won't know what's going on inside of the OTHER instances that you do not control!).
Too damn easy! That's also why I have a couple alts lying around in case I need to jump ship again.