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.
The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.
I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.
Cool, thank you for clarifying!