Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
It’s the same on reddit? Surprised no one.
I just wonder how you can directly query the DB like that. You’d have to be admin of an instance?
Yes, you do have to be an admin but you can be an admin on ANY federated instance, which is a piece that most people likely won’t consider. Admins aren’t an elite group of hand selected staff with background checks. I’m just some shmuck who knows how to format a proper docker compose file and query a database.
All you have to do is host your own instance and other instances you connect with mirror their content to yours. It’s part of the design of the protocol to help reduce user load on any particular server. While users can see content from any connected instance, direct communication happens almost exclusively with their own instance.
I don’t know a lot about the protocol. Don’t the admins of the other instances decide who they federate with? As any additional federated instances will cause more traffic
By default every instance federates with every other instance. You have to take explicit actions to prevent that.