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 assume there’s no privacy whatsoever, and I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise.
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
Completely public
I don’t worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.
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.
☑️ No
✅ Yes
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)_/¯
Well, if we wanna still have voting actions federate between instances and different services (meaning everyone can see the total vote counts, not just the votes given by users on single instance), that information has to be publicly sent to other instances. Like I said, I believe there have been some discussions about ways to anonymize outgoing voting actions, but I imagine there would be quite a few issues to think about. For instance, doing so would probably make it much easier for bad actors to send bogus votes.
The difference of opinion is that Lemmy’s devs believe that services receiving voting data from Lemmy shouldn’t publicly display individual votes, but only the aggregate counts (just like Lemmy itself does). Many others, myself included, think this approach creates a false sense of privacy, potentially leading some users to believe that their votes are private when they actually aren’t, especially given that services like Lemvotes exist.
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.
Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.
From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,
Or just view them on lemvotes.org.
I wish my votes were even more public. If I’ve taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.
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.
My issue with votes is being able to profile users on a pretty deep level. It may not matter all that much now but once bad actors like corporations, scammers, stalkers, etc. start getting involved then there’s a lot negatives that it would bring with it.
That’s understandable; to me though, the user tracking is going to happen. If not votes then comments, if not comments the how long you stayed per page or some other engagement metric.
These days you almost have to assume an adversarial relationship with the internet. You have to assume you’re being aggressively tracked and profiles built and, if it’s part of your threat model, take steps to obfuscate that.
I totally support someone just lurking and not commenting or voting, especially if they’re doing it for OPSEC reasons. I also don’t have a huge issue with people having alt accounts for different purposes and might even encourage it, again for OPSEC reasons.
A solid argument could be made for removing voting completely and I’m not sure I’d disagree with it; but due to the nature of federation if there’s voting, it’ll be public.
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.
I never said don’t care about it. But people need to realize that if they don’t want someone to know something the first thing is don’t fucking say it.
There is so much The Internet does not know about me because I don’t post it ever. It’s like people don’t understand that.
