This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one “professional” (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I’m unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

Was it hard to get this standardized back in the good ol’ days?

Do you think it would be as easy to do it now? If not, what challenges and hurdles would a RFC have to overcome?

The last thing I know that was pretty “significant” is the GNU Terry Pratchett header (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Death) and that was a community effort.