The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
Well if all the upvotes are coming from tiny instances, that’d be a good indicator. You can’t stop it entirely, but you can at least make it a lot harder. I do wish that instances could’ve been somewhat more “randomly” assigned to new users, as that would make any bias in voting sources a huge and obvious red flag.