Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
It’s the nature of the beast. Federated software holds no secrets.
Related: sopuli.xyz/post/31369487
Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
It’s the nature of the beast. Federated software holds no secrets.
Related: sopuli.xyz/post/31369487
npdean@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
It might not be a secret but voting should be a private thing, like most irl voting. It is nowhere explicitly stated to the users, no apps or website says it.
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Even if sites like lemmyvotes disappear and software like kbin/mbin starts hiding the votes all you need to do is to spin up your own lemmy server. Piefeds dev is actively trying to find anway to obsvcure voting, but I think that ended with the choice of public (federated) vote or private (instance-only) voting.
I agree that the public nature of votes could be made more apparent, but the lemmy devs has decided against that
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 4 weeks ago
It's ridiculously stupid. In my opinion. Actually making the votes private would be fine. Making the votes public but making sure everyone knows that would be fine. Trying to pretend they're private, and hiding them in the UI but making it an open secret that they're not private and anyone who knows what they're doing can look at how other people are voting, is textbook harmful security-by-obscurity misleading your users.
It kind of goes with their authoritarian mindset I guess. "Don't question me, I don't have to be honest with you about what's going on, just shut up and go back to your UI which has only the features I allow you to have. Mine has a little dropdown that can look at the votes. Yours doesn't. Get back in your box. All the good users won't look outside what I tell them to."
clb92@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
This is why I actually like that in kbin/mbin you can see up front who has voted what. It doesn’t pretend votes are secret when they aren’t.
socsa@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
I don't understand why everyone is so dismissive of this being a problem. Especially considering it is easily mitigated using simple voting agents.
It's not just a privacy concern either, I promise you that trolls love being able to see which accounts are engaging with them in order to target certain demographics. Like we know this kind of shit has been used to manipulate elections already, and people here are just like "well I guess that's just the world now."
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
If you have an easy solution then I’m sure they would love your code over at github.com/w3c/activitypub
I don’t mind public votes, I do wish lemmy did a better job of showing that they are public though.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
It literally can’t be private, just from the way Lenny works. You can’t have it all. You could in theory make it less visible, but that would be a false sense of privacy as it would be possible to do get the information with some effort. Just having it be fully open is more honest and makes no claims it can’t keep.
It’s social media, even if federated. On Facebook, tiktok or whatever they are also not private btw: maybe users can or can’t see them (I have no idea), but the company behind the platform certainly can and will use it for advertising to you and for what else to show you, making you the product.
npdean@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
The thing is they make it extremely clear that votes are public by letting you see who voted right next to the button.
Lemmy hides this feature and most users don’t know about it.
socsa@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
Piefed did it with voting agents and it worked fine. The reason they rolled it back was just forum politics, because admins didn't like not knowing who was voting, even though they could just ban the agent if they wanted. This, incidentally is just more reason to hate the idea of public votes.
1984@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
If you are logged in to anything, what you do is tied to your account. Welcome to the internet.