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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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You Should Know
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Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?
Would be my question as well. It seems quite obvious that if you participate in publicly viewable discussion, that the stuff you do is publicly viewable.
If you don't want it associated to your physical person, use a VPN and unidentifiable account name.
(And the statement "at least reddit is safe" seems absolutely ridiculous to me.)
Reddit is safer than Lemmy. There cannot be witchhunts on lurkers. IP info is not accessible to anyone but the company.
Your IP isn’t accessible to anyone but your instance admin, that doesn’t federate.
As long as we're talking about privacy issues on Lemmy, I'm pretty sure that isn't true. I strongly suspect that it would be possible to set up a tool that would post image links, or even just track the accesses for your own avatar, in a way where you could statistically be pretty confident of associating IP addresses with usernames after participating in Lemmy for a while (correlating people accessing your avatar image with replying to particular people's comments and then them replying to those comments, sending DMs to particular people from a not-very-much used account, something like that.)
I think modern versions of Lemmy can proxy images to reduce this, but it's hard enough to do robustly that I would bet that there is some kind of way the information leaks out. It's really hard to prevent this kind of thing even if you're trying hard to make it difficult and the Lemmy devs don't seem to be trying all that hard.
I don't even think image proxying is on by default in Lemmy, although I just checked and this Piefed instance is doing it.
reddit safer than lemmy lol
How is Reddit less secure than Lemmy?
you can be sure that reddit tracks you; often you cant even open it when using a vpn. they have an approximate location from your ip, possible movement data when their client is on your phone, and then they enrich their data with external datasets. those are then sold. reddit is a bit more private than facebook, but not as much as you believe. all those sources combined mean they pretty much know who you are.
I agree that they track and are shit at privacy. I specifically find it safer because only the company can track me and not the users.
you know that data is being sold to hundreds of third parties, right? I`m pretty sure that more people get access to that data than there are lemmy users. but you do you, mate
They will not harass me online. Lemmy users can and do.
You are confusing privacy and security .
if getting psychogically profiled and targeted does not count as harassment (i do count it as such) then you are right.
At least no one follows me around everywhere I comment
If someone starts to harrass you due to your voting habits (which I've never heard of happening) you can just block them and move on with your life. The difference between someone saying mean things to you and someone writing them is that you can just stop reading.
Blocking is a bandaid to the problem.
If a person climbs onto a stage to make a statement, and instead of getting on stage to make a counterpoint someone just shouts “booo” from the audience, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand that person to show their face. There’s a certain level of cowardice in simply downvoting without explaining why you disagree. There’s no option to post anonymously here, so it’s not obvious to me that voting should be anonymous either. If people upvote or downvote, they should be willing to stand behind that - and if someone asks for an explanation, you have three choices: ignore them, block them, or explain. I guess there’s also the option to simply not vote at all.
If it were up to me, I’d hide vote counts from users entirely. It’s not all bad, but I’d argue the net effect is negative. Visible votes encourages toxic behavior. When someone makes a controversial claim, you can first downvote them, then dunk on them in a reply - and now they’re being downvoted into oblivion while you get applause for your smug comment. It feels like you've won the debate when in reality, nobody’s mind changed. Heavily downvoted comments also prime readers to dislike them before they even read them, instead of approaching with a neutral mindset and then forming their own opinion - or reading further to see other perspectives. As it stands, the system mostly trains people to recognize what’s popular on a platform so they can self-censor to avoid downvotes, and feel validated for shouting down people who voice unpopular opinions.
So, if someone asks me to explain why I downvoted something, I might explain or I might not - but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask. On the other hand, if someone makes it their personal mission to follow me around and harass me because I downvoted their comment, I think it’s unreasonable to demand the system be changed just so I don’t have to deal with it. There’s already a solution for that: blocking them.
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Dude, pick a lane.
I don't see a conflict here but I'm happy to explain if you elaborate on what's confusing about what I said.
And forth we have you downvoting without an explanation (the thing you said was cowardly) after you said:
I have not downvoted you in this thread.
Of course you haven't. Still not seeing the promised explanation.
One situation where I wouldn’t bother explaining myself is when it’s obvious the other person isn’t actually interested in a conversation, and they’re just there to posture and throw accusations.
You have a great day.
So once again: pick a lane
First we have "the problem is downvoting without a reply" (which for the record is the argument of a Sea Lion. Downvote and move on is perfectly acceptable)
Then we have "the problem is seeing downvotes and replying" which... Didn't you just ask for replys when downvotes?
Finally we have "if asked I may or may not explain why I downvoted" which again is contrary to your initial issue of "people downvoting without giving a reason why" as you apparently are doing that exact thing and you might give a reason why if asked.
WHO BOOED? GET UP HERE THIS INSTANT - I DEMAND TO KNOW WHO BOOED!
If people are harassing you privately, I'm sorry and I'm sure you can message a mod. If you like to express your opinion through votes and adding to the pile but don't like others knowing you did so, you're a coward.
I don’t understand why people are calling me a coward. I gave an unpopular opinion, I stood by it and then made a post that might subject my account to scrutiny.
I think they are referring to the point that you want your personal votes to be kept private. Some say it is a form of "cowardice" to not vote publicly.
Personally I see your point is very valid and at least this should be more actively described when signing up for Lemmy and that obviously your instance admins can see everything and you should be very careful (e.g. VPN) if you'd like to participate privately in a conversation. Maybe this is not the right platform for you then ufortunately. Everything in life has its pros and cons and certainly Lemmy is not perfect.
I don't want just my votes to be private, though. It should be private for everyone. Why are people not seeing that?
Yes.
Is this a joke? Are you here as some pro reddit propaganda machine?
I feel hat posts/comments are much more of a privacy exposure than any vote.
If the OP wants private voting vs their post/comments then two account would be the solution to that - this is how it is done in the backend on piefed
Also if only voting is so bad, just don't vote. Those votes are not used for anything but ranking in lists for others, you'll not see any difference for yourself if you stop voting.
It is a social forum. Voting and commenting is the core part of the experience.
Yes. So does seeing how you are voting and commenting.
If you're a lurker who votes, voting would be your only exposure.
If you are a lurker that votes then I very little that some random could tie back to your home address or even IP
Which only has rather limited information derivable from it. The most "identifying" would be to vote regularly on a community dedicated to your local area.
If you don't trust your instance with knowing your IP-address, then the issue is not going to be solved by "anonymous voting". Because your instance has to know if you voted on something or not, so votes cannot be done multiple times. This is unavoidable and equal to the situation when using reddit. Except that you can choose a different instance if you distrust the current instance.
OP either did not think through what he is claiming or he is driven by an agenda.
Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)
Says who? Voting/likes are public on a lot of social media sites, as long as the content itself is public. The only mainstream ones I can think of where it's not are YouTube and reddit.
Yes.
No.
That is not true. Most votes irl are in fact public to the audience. Did you ever participate in a democratically organized group? Local council votes are usually done by raising hands. Votes in HOA meetings are usually done by raising hands. Your sports club deciding on a new executive and treasurer? Guess what. Raising hands.
On most social media the voting is public, see Facebook/Twitter likes. Hell back in the days of forums you could usually see the list of users that liked a given thread in most of the forum software I ever used. Reddit was the anomaly really
I think piefed has a feature where your votes never leave your instance, so are not exposed in this way (but obviously only appear on your home instance too)
Agree that it should be clearer to people coming from Reddit that that's how it works though.