Good point, but is it then possible to come up with detection algorithms that makes it hard for upbotters even if they know the algorithm? I think that would be more ideal than security through obfuscation but not sure how feasible that is

Is there any existing opensource tool for manipulation detection for lemmy? If not we should create one to reduce the manual workload for instance admins

Theoretically, without the server, every time you want to connect to a peer you would have to figure out what’s their public IP address is, which can change. The server acts as a middleman between the peers so you dont have to do this manually, all peers only need to know the server’s IP address to connect to each other. The server is really only used for this initial linking up of peers, afterwards the connection is P2P (if possible, they fall back to a relay server if P2P fails).

they have a pro server with more features that’s closed source and paid