Well, here’s the thing: there is no vote fuzzing in Lemmy. The software doesn’t support it. Period.

I’ve been paying attention to the Lemmy mod tools and Lemmy admin Matrix rooms, and it’s been the subject of major discussion over the past week between one or two users who keep bringing it up and, like, everyone else (including the Lemmy devs) who are all like, “no, not now, not ever.”

It’s not a thing.

SO, what could explain what you’re seeing?

Possible explanations include:

1. Vote brigading - old-school reddit tactic to get a bunch of users to dogpile a comment with up votes or down votes to achieve the desired effect.

2. Alt account abuse - you got a fan who hates you, and they registered several alto accounts on an instance or across several instances, and they use several logins to register multiple up and or down votes. Congratulations, you got a fan, and they hate you. There’s not much you can do, unless you can find proof and submit it to each and every instance admin and hope they care enough to take action, or you can just ignore it and feel pity for the person who has an obsession for you. I recommend the latter.

3. A genuine statistical fluke where there are genuine votes that are producing this bizarre pattern, and hopefully it will subside soon along with your reasonably justified paranoia.

The good news is that the solution to all of these possibilities, and possibly other possibilities that I did not enumerate here, is to just ignore the problem and move on with your life. Remember: nothing that happens here is really important to you individually, nor to any of this collectively with regards to what people really say or do here, so you can move on and live your life, secure knowledge that the things people do and say here and the votes that occur here as well as the comments will have absolutely no impact on your real life.

I really hope this makes you feel better. Because it should.