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.
On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.
Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there’s Lemvotes. It’s kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.
Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone’s vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that’s merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.
The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?
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.
Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.
But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.
Zero. Upvotes are a show of appreciation and I don’t see why anyone would want that to be private. When it comes to downvotes, if you wouldn’t want someone to know you downvoted something, you can’t stand by that decision and so shouldn’t have downvoted in the first place. Public reactions (alongside the self moderation features) keeps the fediverse honest and prevents the hostile type of downvote spamming you see on other platforms like reddit.
zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”
Zero. Use this site with a VPN and assume any data you put on here is being harvested.
On Lemmy? As others have said, they’re automatically federated and so anyone can see them.
On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That’s how it should be. IMHO, more of y’all should use Piefed.
That’s kind of neat, but why would it matter if your votes do or don’t federate?
Like someone else said, how would you feel if someone was collecting all user votes across the threadiverse and tracking who likes and dislikes each post, say about politics or just a news story?
We are mostly / usually anonymous here but like everything online, I wouldn’t totally count on that. Not to sound like too much of a crackpot, but “Enemy of the state” could be a real label some government could put on you, based on your voting, in the future.
Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.
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.
Data has to federate, so nothing is going to really be private like you mention. I think it’s unreasonable to expect anything otherwise. I don’t see a point to hiding votes because of this. If someone starts stalking or harassing their voters for some reason, have a reporting system and handle that.
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.
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.
They are not, it’s akin to shouting in the rain. Most people will be inside not getting wet, but there people that either like the rain, or get paid to stand in it
The lemmy vote viewer is quite limited but I suspect that there are are a few servers that have spun there own DB queries and charting:
Its like sitting near a window basically, people on the sidewalk are gonna have trouble seeing you with just their eyes (i mean like most sidewalks are quite far away to the window because of front yards) but anyone could get a camera with zoom lens and see your face.
Me personally I would say that private votes are better if possible. But you should be able to filter when you’re logged in what you upvoted and downvoted. That’s how I would like it ideally.
