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
To allow other instances to know about your vote, Lemmy federates it. This involves the post you downvoted and your account. Neither is really optional here, as the receiving instance needs your account to verify the vote.
When another instance receives your vote, it’s up to them how they handle it. Mbin used to display both of them to users, but due to backlash from Lemmy users they made downvotes private eventually. Upvotes are still visible on Mbin though. Other fediverse platforms might also display your votes to users like Mbin and Lemvotes do. And of course anyone can make a minimal ActivityPub implementation and subscribe to a Lemmy community and get all the votes made within.