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 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.
On the other hand, setting local votes means that your vote doesn’t count for the vast majority of the verse.
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.
If I was worried about that I’d probably refrain from voting on those kind of posts, or use a separate account to do it. As it is whoever is u/d a post or comment is easily viewable anyway.
less y’all is a good thing for everyone else.