I think the only thing worse than something not being private, is if the fact that it’s not private is not common knowledge leading to tons of people thinking it’s private.
Lemmy doesn’t even show a list of what you the logged in user voted on. But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is. I think obsecuring information like this does more harm than good, since a lot of people won’t actively go out and research what kind of data in their Lemmy account is publicly accessible beyond the data they can see from the website itself.
It’s been discussed before that there isn’t an easy way to hide who voted for what on a federated platform while still having all the instances correctly count votes for everyone. Therefore, if actually making votes anonymous seems not to be viable, why not just make it public for everyone like Mastodon does? I don’t think we should make them inbox items like on Mastodon, or at least not the same inbox as the rest of the notifications so votes don’t drown them out. I think a dropdown on the content itself showing who voted on it and in which direction is probably enough. Also a tab on the user page showing a list of everything the user voted on, at least on the logged in user’s own page (I mainly want this so I can keep track of what I voted on).
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently, and while that’s not desirable from a content perspective, it is from a user perspective.
People don’t know unless it is in their face. Put it where everyone can see it. More drama, more engagement? Whatever.
I think PieFed has anonymous voting as an option. This might affect making vote histories more visible.
If I understand it right, each real piefed account gets an associated “shadow account” used for voting and the piefed instance admin that the account is from can correlate the two if needed.
It’s a checkbox in settings.
[ ] Vote privately
Votes will be sent to untrusted instances using an alt
I voted your comment up btw
I’m on that honour system now
You, sir, deserve and upvote
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently
Why? Lemmy is a pseudonymous platform. Who cares what content individual users up or downvote. The votes being public is the only way to deal with brigading across instances.
The comments below started me on a trail that led me to a relevant comment from a Lemmy dev:
I want to remind everyone that since users overwhelmingly don’t want their votes snooped on (for good reason), we will never add anything like this inside lemmy, lemmy-ui, or jerboa.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to either implement real vote privacy or just open the viewing window up for everyone equally?
Vote privacy can be tricky in an environment where every vote gets sent to thousands of instances and needs to be verified as legit via the ActivityPub protocol.
Piefed does a good job of this I think. If vote privacy is enabled, they create a second account that is used only for votes. Other instances see the votes and can validate them against the vote account but it’s not tied to the actual user (except in their home server database).
A benefit of this is that the vote account for the user is always the same, so you can still track vote manipulation, and ban the vote account if needed.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is.
It’s also trivial for us to defederate from such tools, which our instance and others have done in the case of lemvotes.
I liked the visibility of votes on kbin, convenient to see if one was getting up or down votes from a variety of users and not just the same people over and over.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is
Is there a tool made for this out there? As far as I’m aware, the simplest way for the average user to do that is to run their own instance and then manually query its database directly, which is far from trivial.
This came out a day or two ago, which removes that hurdle: https://lemvotes.org/
Just paste the permalink in. Works on posts, comments, and users.
It was only a matter of time.
That’s been out a couple months now.
There is. (YMMV, it doesn’t always work)
Even more anti lemmy propaganda. Capitalists must be scared shitless.
In what way is a suggestion for improving Lemmy anti Lemmy propaganda?
Your wording.
“I have an idea to improve it” or even opening an issue with the devs would be the way to do this. Instead you front against something that is, lets face it, tons more private and more free than 99% of the world population give less than half a shit about.
currently, every day people try to cancel either lemmy or the devs while fascists are killing protesters in the US and the whole world tries to get totalitarian capitalist control.
Its like living in a boring horror movie.
Eh, that seems like a shit ton of clutter for no real benefit.
As it is, if someone wants the info, it’s easy to get, but doesn’t add more junk to the UI
