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
This is just ridiculous.
It’s only ridiculous because you’re used to pouring your entire life into Facebook or Google’s servers.
If you’re disturbed by it being public, I think you should be just as disturbed by it being in the hands of data farmers and merchants.
The fact of the matter is, nothing you do online is private—and on the spectrum of “how private is it,” social media platforms are traditionally designed to put you at the near zero end of it. So separate your concerns if you want any illusion of separation from your actual life.
You made assumptions about my social media use that are wrong. I don’t interract with them because I don’t like the way they are run and the data they gather will for sure be used against me. I interact with the fediverse because it doesn’t start from a point of abuse, but it can very clearly be abused and I would honestly prefer that this particular information would not be available in any way since it is the most frictionless but also the most potentially exposing way you interact with this platform.
At least when pouring my shit into Big Tech I can be reasonably sure that it disappears into the ocean of other data they have, and it’s exceptionally unlikely that someone with the access to do so would actually look into me specifically.
That any unhinged individual on the internet can pull out more information than strictly necessary about my online history is a completely different threat model. I understand that the federated model requires some level of data sharing to keep track of posts but I would kind of have expected that the instance that “owns” the post would be the only instance that needs this info.
On the other hand, I’m sure that absolute privacy like completely hidden post history to some extent will help bad faith actors with troll farms and bots so I don’t fucking know.