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
The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It’s why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Yes, the information is sent to your instance, and then is being censored by your instance. It’s personal choice for the instance and it’s support. But your instance must either be commonly supporting you not seeing it, or dictating you aren’t seeing it.
Kind of like the championship football game played in the U.S. today before the Superbowl, where Fox edited out access to seeing people paying tribute to the man murdered by ice.
Sometimes it’s good to have information, sometimes people think it is not
I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. “Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt” is my go-to justification.
I like your style
Does that happen?
I crashed out once and DMd someone who had downvoted a couple of my comments because I overreacted and thought I was being targeted. I’m not a particularly stable individual.
Felt terrible, they were a good sport about it though.
I just blocked my votes from federating. it’s nobody’s business what I upvote.
If your votes don’t federate then they have no effect other than you seeing the arrow light up.
That just means you’re not voting …
If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they’re a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it’s a fetish, honestly.
You’re fine.
Much easier to determine vote manipulation when there is no central authority to handle it and the votes, as well as moderation actions, are publicly visible.
Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.
It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.
As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
It’s the main metric by which you determine what posts are popular.
And the first layer of moderation.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn’t want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
Who cares? Upvote what you like, downvote what you don’t. Who cares if someone has a whinge.
The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv
I’m pretty sure the Pub doesn’t stand for Public, but rather Publish.
edit: not saying that it is private, just my opinion on whether the pub is an adjective or a verb
And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?
You are right but you can’t exactly publish something and expect it to be private
Still Publish, not Privish.
And certainly not ActivityCafé
Thanks! That’s is very helpful and also concerning
Not sure how I feel about this
Why is that concerning? The whole system was meant to be transparent
Not the OP, but i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything! We should all know by now that there are bad actors actively using this kind of data in the worst ways imaginable. In the US this can already have life threatening consequences (ICE raids etc…)
This is not a good privacy oriented design and it exposes users in a dangerous way.
EDIT: About lemvotes.org. I like this site because it makes it obvious how dangerous this really is. For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone. This will forever be visible to the world. I’m a documented pervert now. Good job.
Someone can spin up an instance and have votes federated to them anyway, so regardless of whether lemvotes exists or not, people can harvest your information.
Which is why you shouldn’t put all your interests in one account.
Have one account for memes and shitposts, then another for bringing down the patriarchy and kinky stuff. OK, so maybe 3 accounts
Piefed alleviates some of these issues.
Can you elaborate on this?
i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything!
So don’t interact. What you read isn’t stored, but if you interact, it should be public.
For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone.
I agree that it’s dumb you don’t have a “my votes” page where you can remove that. But you can go to said post and just remove your vote.
So in a niche community we are now promoting that people don’t interact with said community if they care about their privacy at all?
I had expected reactions to be encrypted, as it’s not a build in feature of Lemmy itself. If it was, I feel like it should have been visible, just like the modlog. There must have been a reason why the Lemmy devs don’t show a list of who up votes or down votes
If it would be encrypted, it would open up for vote manipulation. There are plans that mods will see who upvotes in their communities. Create multiple accounts on different instances if you need more privacy, separate personalities for different topics.
Create multiple accounts on different instances
Isn’t that manipulation too?
It’s to guard against bot accounts. I’d much rather have that instead of the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there’s clearly artificial voting going on.
It’s still not that hard to mess around but I’ll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it’s sometimes a false positive like in your case.
I agree that it is good with transparency, but then this should also be freely available on the Lemmy platform, and even the clients, in the same way as modlogs list what is going on.
I knew that admins could somehow go into the database and check who has done what, but I assumed that this was only the admin, and maybe even that the info was encrypted. It’s alright with me that it’s not, but then why not display it on each post and comment, with a list of interactions to it.
In this case, it’s this post:
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088Although, the comment where people were being called out, may have been removed (not sure if it’s because I have blocked the user, or they have blocked me)
I fully agree it should be transparent instead of a kind of trick you learn eventually. Won’t happen anytime soon though, the Lemmy devs are against the notion. They actually block lemvotes on their instance which is a bit ironic because they insta ban people for down voting a lot from what I understand.
I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
Which community/instance did this? I’d like to block it.
If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.
also don’t do this because fuck that
I’ve already run into a few people that have burners that upvote themselves and downvote any disagreements. Pretty cringe shit.
Lol, that is super lame.
That’s creepy! I down vote and am down voted constantly.
It’s also petty… But knowing that this is so easy to identify people behind vote activity fundamentally changes how I feel about Lemmy
Maybe we should convey to new users more strongly that ActivityPub software “is like a large open place, where you can publish what you want (minus moderated content) and everyone has the ability to see everything you did”.
I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?
This is the point though. If it’s hidden by the platform, I feel like exposing it in public is against the sentiment
If voting was public through Lemmy and its clients, it would be more open and not only partly anonymous
I had assumed that if voting activity was meant to be public, there would have been a feed like the mod logs, for each users activity
That’s true, but I think this is more of a development thing than an actual aim of Lemmy. Due to the nature of federation, everything must be open. As the Software is strongly inspired by Reddit, transparent votes is something that is technically exposed via the API but not yet implemented in the UI. But I think any app developer could integrate this into their app if they liked. It seems like Mbin chose a different path way.
In general, there is no congruent sentiment in Lemmy development, but I agree there should be one or it should be discussed with the community. Have you looked if there is an already ongoing discussion on git?
I care more about PieFed, but I don’t know how they look on the topic though.
I just think it should be more obviously transparent, rather than the UI pretending it has no attribution.
I recall some proposal about adding the info to the UI and objections due to privacy concerns, which is just pretending something is private.
I would like if vote counts weren’t shown until after you voted, so it doesn’t influence your opinion
You can vote and change your vote. It would be a useless feature.
The “Reddit” way is to allow votes to be hidden for some length of time (often a few hours, but I think up to 1 day).
