Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.
Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.
This change doesn’t lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
Because voters only receive a voting ballot after they identify themselves as a real citizen with a real passport?
Passport required? Shit, most of our country would be ineligible to vote as they can’t afford to travel out of the country for vacations enough to keep up to date passports. Valid up to date passports are around 40% of the population in the U.S. I believe it is trending up though. Pre 9-11 they were way lower. (Because you didn’t really need a passport to go on short trips, just an ID)
That would be great. I’m not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
Maybe there’s some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.
Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.
Good point. Would it be useful to somewhat anonymize them by giving every user a unique code? So admins would see these codes but not easily know what users they represent.
I accept if a dozen people can see my votes.
That’s not what you’re saying.
Ultimately I’m not invested in this decision. If the instance wants to watch people vote then people stop voting truly or at all.
Except, if you’re using anything other than Lemmy at this point that information is already about. The Likes/Dislikes are considered public information by the protocol. Lemmy devs probably just didn’t get around to building out the UI for that before the Reddit APIcolypse.
Lemmy actually marks votes as private for federation, but it seems that kbin/mbin ignore that.
If anything, Lemmy devs should work on methods to obscure user identities, not expose them.
One of the biggest issues with the fediverse is very specifically how much user information can be exposed outside your home instance. As has been pointed out in this thread, it is very easy for rogue instance admins to set up quiet data mining instances.
It seems like it should be relatively straightforward for certain activities, like votes and telemetry, to be anonymized/tokenized for the purposes of federation, since that information all propagates outward from the home instance anyway.
