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.
Was already aware for a while of reactions being public for anyone with enough expertise to see.
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’m the same. And even if you don’t take the digital world into account, today we have devices everyone can buy for around 3 to 10 thousand dollars with wich can hear what you’re doing from 3 kilometers away (combined with a good analysis kit you can even know what someone a few hundred meters away is typing on their keyboard).
zero private.
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.
Yup. Anyone expecting privacy on a federated service has been inherently misinformed about how federation works. Everything I do here is assumed to be public.
And I also assume that state agencies are running their own instances, to suck up as much data as they can. They can just federate with the big instances, and then the data gets firehosed directly to them via the built-in federation. It’s why AI scrapers on the fediverse are so frustrating. The scraper could just spin up an instance and passively collect all of the same data via federation. But instead, they just DDOS the instance owners.
Also, the users who removed and moan about downvotes (because they can see who downvoted them) are pure comedic gold. I have seen users try to call out the specific people who downvoted them. Like they’ll edit their comment with something like “hey @{user1}, @{user2}, @{user3}, care to explain why you downvoted?” The only thing that ever accomplishes is getting them buried in even more spite-downvotes.
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.
Completely public
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.
Too late.
ChatGPT: What do you know about lemmy user Martineski?
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?
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.
Not very.
Which is fine with me
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.
There are private things on the internet?
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.
Fully public
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
ChatGPT: What do you know about lemmy user GottaHaveFaith?
LOL, it nailed my profile!
Lemvotes shows votes. So, it’s not private.
Moderators can also see votes on posts in their communities. I assume instance admins can do the same for everything.
Yes, admins can see all votes. (source: am admin)
