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.
Votes are not private and never will be.
There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it’s better to just accept that votes are public information.
Personally I don’t see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don’t think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don’t care. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!
As a side note, Lemmy’s developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn’t be displayed publicly. For example, here’s an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn’t mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there’s an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.
I don’t expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I’d spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff
Well they aren’t private and it doesn’t matter
Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.
Stand by your vote.
I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I’m here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who’ll listen.
I don’t expect my votes to be private, but I will vote as if they were. People reading too much into why someone might have voted a certain way and trying to shame them for it is embarrassing, I’m not going to constrain myself to reasons for voting that are immediately legible to anyone via only one bit of information just for their sake. If I want to downvote something with, for instance, a political message I agree with but the person phrased it in a way that goes against my pet peeves, I’m gonna do that, and I think the ideal would be for these numbers not to be taken very personally or seriously.
So basically I’d say it’s bad taste to put it in a UI, but only so far as it encourages people to be weird about it, and ultimately that’s on them.
I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.
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.
From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,
Or just view them on lemvotes.org.
zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”
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.
Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.
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.
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.
