I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
I mostly solve this by upvoting what I like and ignoring the downvote option, reserving it for advertisement bots and spam.
I think that having the voting record hidden in the client UI makes more harm than good to be honest and would’ve preferred if the devs changed their mind on tricking end users that voting is anonymous.
The federated design of fediverse means that upvotes and downvotes must sync between instances and as such they’re not hidden or anonymous in any real sense. Anyone with a fediverse instance can see the votes.
lemvotes.org democratise this by allowing everyone, not just techies with their own instance, to see the votes.
One should know that lemvotes.org isn’t a perfect source of truth though, when I lefthand scroll I sometimes fat finger a downvote that I remove again. The latest downvote in my record is one of those.
https://lemvotes.org/ state I downvoted a post:
https://feddit.uk/ sees 75 upvotes:
https://sopuli.xyz/ sees 75 upvotes and I clearly have not voted:
How dare you not upvote my post.
I blame it on rarely upvoting posts at all! Or maybe it was someone elses fault, must be someone else to blame. I think. Is it your fault? You made me not do it? You must’ve made me not do it. You’re to blame. I’m certain.
This doesn’t solve the privacy issue. It still enables bad actors to create a very detailed profile of who you are, just by looking at the content you upvoted. Your interests, political alignment, medical/mental health issues, sexual orientation… just to name a few.
If you don’t sign in or don’t interact, then you don’t have anything to worry about. Reddit doesn’t make votes public but it definitely is selling your voting data as well as IP and location data to third parties.
Lemmy just publishes the data it needs to make activity pub work. If you don’t do anything that generates an AP action then there is no data on you that somebody can compile. I agree that it probably isn’t a good idea to hide the fact that AP actions like upvotes or downvotes are public, but that’s how the protocol works
Yeah, if you wanna lurk and not comment because you want to stay private then I recommend not voting at all.
If a person is already engaging in communities with comments like you and I are right now then I think the added details from our upvotes only strengthen what they already know from our comments.
I think most of my upvotes are in comment chains like this, when I think that they add value and are on topic.
I had assumed that this was somehow encrypted. Especially as it is not a build in feature of Lemmy itself, to show who has reacted in certain ways
And that assumption is why I think the choice of the devs to hide it was wrong. They essentially tricked you.
Having votes transparent makes manipulation much harder and people much nicer.