this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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I know nothing about Lemmy's architecture, but how does my instance tally votes on a post from another instance?
Does it trust that instance? Does it only take into account votes cast on itself? Does it ask every federated instance for their vote totals?
Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.
Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.
I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc... but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).
One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.
Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.
That's quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they'd have to stream a bunch of fake events.
Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.