From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes, but I’m curious at what the community’s perspective on how “private” that is. I think Mbin already shows upvoters? Piefed allows anonymous voting. I also know there are sites which show all voting history, but assuming those are fairly disliked.
My general questions to the community: - Do you expect your votes to be private, or just not shown in the UI? - Would per-voter votes showing up on another aggregator platform bother you, even though your instance already shares them with other servers?
For context I’m the dev doing some two way bridge interop between atproto + Threadiverse, in atproto the votes/likes are generally publicly accessible, you just look at the users repo through something like pdsls.dev, they’re readable and archivable by anyone. In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern (Ex all my votes: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:lmdkqemqrqnfiix72pyjhfey/social.coves.feed.vote). Ultimately trying to figure out if there’s already a mutual understanding that they are public and we can just mirror them or whether they should stay hidden as an aggregate.
Better question? Do votes ultimately matter? Some instances show who voted, some don’t, some don’t even count downvotes. So in the end, who cares?
zero private.
I didn’t know that administrators or moderators could see the votes. So they can’t be considered completely private.
About 10 years ago I decided that the only way I could proceed forward in life is to automatically assume I’m being watched and listened to always. This has nothing to do with paranoia and everything to do with the nature of tech ownership and capitalism.
This is a very good assumption to make. Because it’s true.
I realize they aren’t private and don’t care.
I vote on such a small minority of things that those few things I do vote on, I have no problem with people knowing it was me.
I assume there’s no privacy whatsoever, and I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise.
There’s zero faith involved in open source. It’s verifiable with your own eyes, thankfully.
In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern
You are like one LLM prompt away from a website that makes it fairly easy to look at and discern so that’s not really a valid argument
I don’t worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.
☑️ No
✅ Yes
Literally none I basically assumed that anything I do on the internet can be read by anyone at any time. I’m still a fucking freak because they’ll have to kill me to stop me from being freaky. If I die unexpectedly the government did it. Never forget that.
He died how he lived: being freaky.
Completely public
Well they aren’t private and it doesn’t matter
I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I’m here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who’ll listen.
Votes are not private and never will be.
There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it’s better to just accept that votes are public information.
Personally I don’t see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don’t think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don’t care. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!
As a side note, Lemmy’s developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn’t be displayed publicly. For example, here’s an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn’t mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there’s an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.
Lemmy’s developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn’t be displayed publicly.
I guess they shouldn’t have made votes public then… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What’s the worst that could happen?
Some data brokers looking through your preferences and building a profile out of you, I guess.
ChatGPT: What do you know about piefed user XiELEd?
You’re from the Philippines? So is my wife! :) Really into Ceylon teas are you?
Sure, but what they’re gonna do with that is the question. Like even if there is a profile on my Lemmy account, which ads are they going to send me? How? Where is that data going to be worth anything?
I mean I live in a country whose political environment was irrevocably changed because of Cambridge Analytica. And facebook’s algorithm is partly being blamed for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. It’s not really about you that I’m worried with, but for others in general.
I don’t expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I’d spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff
This is the anonymous way
