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.
I don’t worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.
Completely public
☑️ 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.
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.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Some data brokers looking through your preferences and building a profile out of you, I guess.
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.
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)_/¯
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
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.
From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,
Or just view them on lemvotes.org.
Stand by your vote.
I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.
They’re not private at all, I’ve never been under the illusion that they were.
I like it, have some guts, stand on business. If people want to downvote they should be willing to attach their name to it, internet points are fake anyway.
not. at all. i consider anything i put here akin to standing on my nearest street corner during rush hour, shouting into the darkness
confused how anyone could think anything otherwise.
confused how anyone could think anything otherwise
Because you can’t see them by default. Just because there are lots of techies on here doesn’t mean everyone thinks about how it all works.
I think it’s much better to make it very obvious that votes are public so new users don’t accidentally think they’re anonymous.
I guarantee you multiple individuals be they personal or corporate have spun up their own Lemmy instances and are scraping the shit out of what is here.
Exactly, so it’s important for everyone to know that their every action is very public
If you want privacy you shouldn’t be using a computer. Full stop.
I get your point but it’s so reductive that it’s kind of unhelpful. Sure if the CIA are coming after you then you are pretty fucked, but there are so many tiny things that the casual user can do to make massive improvements, and saying that none of it matters if they even use a computer means they won’t bother even trying.
zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”
Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.
