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!).
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!).