I have been using lemmy for a while now (since Reddit’s API issues) and just recently discovered this website:
Seems I can simply input any user and I get their whole history of upvotes and downvotes, with dates and links. I also tried it with a Piefed user and it worked.
Kind of a deal breaker for me. Don’t feel comfortable even upvoting when these details are public to anyone.
That’s just the nature of the fediverse, all actions are public for transparency and accountability.
Even moderator actions are public.
Actions are public, but not the identity of who took the action, right?
Not to the regular users if “Hide modlog mod names” is enabled, but other instance admins (including remote admins) can see it all regardless. So the info itself is federated across instances.
Ex: if I look at the /c/politics@lemmy.world modlog as a guest
if I look at the same modlog but with my lemmy.ca instance admin account
As long as votes are tied to your account they won’t be private, because at the least the admins of your server (whether lemmy, piefed, or reddit) can see them. The difference with lemmy and piefed is that because of federation, the admins of any instance can see them - so anyone interested could just make their own instance, federate with your home server, and then see your votes.
As long as this is the case, it makes more sense to not try to pretend that votes are private and make ineffective attempts to hide them, imo.
If this isn’t something you’re on board with, though, you may want to look into piefed cuz iirc @rimu was working on a way for piefed instances to only federate a vote total and not individual user votes. AFAIK your votes would still be visible to your instance admins, which gives it an equivalent level of vote privacy to reddit (except that you get to choose who to trust, which is a pretty large benefit).
Private votes are no longer federated in PieFed
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/928
I’m guessing but i want to say Preventing abuse and harassment are the reasons.
First of: the admin of your instance could see your votes even if the feature was “private”. They just gotta query the database.
Example of harassment; you make many accounts and religiously downvote a certain user or community posts.
Example of abuse is even more clear; if the user voting on a post is not registered at all on the database then its literally impossible to prevent users from calling upvote or downvote 100 million times, rendering the feature useless.
My personal opinion is that the feature should be " opt in" on an instance basis, but idk man.
With how federation works it does really help investigating vote manipulation cases.
There is a user who is super active on a community and was consistently getting downvoted with 10-15 downvotes, making sure certain post filters would never show this content on all feed. All the downvoters were the same on every post, they were from a new instance that has/had no web frontend and none had comment history.
Admins are already able to view votes though?
I don’t like like it either. But if an instance is going to ban me for expressing genuine opinions I don’t want to be a part of that instance anyways.
Interesting, I’m also feeling a bit disenfranchised. Why all the downvotes on this post? Wait, let’s check who these evil downvoters are… Yeah case in point, I see the problem here as this could lead to malicious trolling and the start of an undesirable platform.
Edit: lemvotes throws a 404 not found so did the fediverse dodge a bullet?
Simply a wrong URL: https://lemvotes.org/
Anyway, there’s no way to hide the information. The instances need to communicate with each other and send each activity, so if I upvote something, my instance notifies yours (and every other it federates with) about it so that your instance can display it as well.
That’s most likely how the site works - it’s simply an ActivityPub server which gets notifications from every server that federates with it.
Theoretically, your instance admins could defederate from them and then it would stop getting updates.
Feeds need to be public in order to be federated
i made about 100,000↑& many↓ in here … your site says i made :
30↑ & 0 ↓on posts
19 ↑ & 1↓on comments …… i know this information is somehow public but maybe not so easily
my up and down votes (image)
Shows thousands for my user. If it’s implemented using activity pub (which makes the most sense) it needs to federate with all the instances and instances rarely send historical data. Meaning that all your new upvotes and downvotes will be tracked currently, but historical accuracy might be shaky.
I mean, you could use separate accounts for posting and voting. Use over Tor. It’d be anonymous.
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