Who cares? If your upvote or downvote or any other activity you deliberately perform on a public platform is something you're embarrassed about and wouldn't be willing to do in a face to face engagement you probably shouldn't be doing it.
I agree, and if you absolutely must, then maybe make an alt?
The main problem is most people assume their votes are private, as they are private on reddit.
The whole concept of the Fediverse as social media is that all the data is public. Stop acting like these servers are giving out private data. This data has never been private, and it never will be. Data like this being shared with any other server is how ActivityPub and the Fediverse work.
I know, but some people assume votes are private.
If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!
It's not good practice. Really one shouldn't be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That's why Lemmy has local-only communities, the "private" community aspect that many people want just won't be federated, because you can't make something like this private otherwise.
I know, but most people don't.
I know, it's a really big problem here and on the Fediverse in general because people get so outraged and entitled over something that just is the way things are, this wouldn't work any other way.
There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.
Well yes, the whole concept of the fediverse is that of social media as a public service. All activitypub data is public.
Yes, but as long as you don’t reveal your identity, they can’t do much to track you.
They don’t have access to your IP.
Of course, it you’re using the same username over multiple services, or reveal identifying information (which is much easier to analyse now due to AI) they will be able to track you.
This feature has been available to all kbin/Mbin users since the beginning, btw.
This is nothing new. Fire up any ActivityPub server and you can see everything over the wire. As a Lemmy admin of my server of just me, I can also see it in the UI.
Wouldn't you be able to see it by curl
ing the outboxes?
This isn't just a Frendica thing; you can see this from Mastodon, mbin/kbin, etc. Many people seem to think upvotes and downvotes are private, but the reality is that they're publicly available information by default in ActivityPub. Lemmy just hides the information on the front-end for "normal" users; If you're a moderator you can clearly see everything.
If one wants truly pseudonymous voting, they're free to try out PieFed. See the announcement post for this feature for more details.
Or you can be an instance admin. Iirc In the next lemmy version (1.0.0), mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
You can already do this using tesseract, by the way (not tesseract.dubvee.org, strangely?)
On t.lemmy.dbzer0.com i can see both upvotes and downvotes (for all my modded comms):
I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can't be identified across posts
There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.
I'm not sure about the downvotes part (i failed to recreate this lmao) but you can already view upvotes with mbin. Piefed solves this problem with a option to make your votes private but only with untrusted instances (but from my tests it didn't work? weird)
IIRC, piefed's private votes are disabled for "trusted" instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.
I mod a small community with like 6 monthly users, I'm the only one who post or comment and the average post have 3/4 upvotes and 1 downvote. And I always ask myself who is downvoting my submissions, because it's make no sense to me that someone take the job of pressing the downvote button on a link to a EDM set. Couldn't they just block the community?
I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance
this is an icky issue because lemmy sends votes with empty addressing, so remote instances should count them but not show them to anyone. however mastodon (and *key) sends likes with empty addressing too, but considers them public. lemmy is (surprisingly) right here and should request that the rest of fedi respects the protocol and hides stuff based on its addressing. maybe open issues on mastodon and friendica
also this issue probably exists when seeing lemmy posts on any microblogging instance
Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.
There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!
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