Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  1. You don’t need to be federated to read people’s activities…
  2. Even if there was some type of “authorized fetch” involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?

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  • rimu@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ok, yeah, theoretically.

    But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      And the “we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse” is also theoretical.

      Anyway, I’m already on record saying that I don’t like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.

      I’m also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.

      If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I’m all for it.

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      • Iceblade02@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        We’ve already seen that kind of harrasment on major platforms including X and those owned by Meta.

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      • kux@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        the illusion of privacy

        i am from the post usenet and pre facebook internet generation (i hope that is vague enough) so using my real name on the internet or signing up for accounts with my real name email acount is strictly verboten by indoctrination, so my opinion may be out of date or invalid somehow, but i can not see how your lemmy account’s up or down voting history violates privacy in any meaningful way

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    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s in the mbin ui already

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      • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        So the technical-skill-bar is transforming a lemmy link into the equivalent on an mbin instance? That is huge.

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  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).

    But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I ran curl “https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1” -H ‘accept: application/activity+json’ and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.

      In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

      All of this to say:

      • the debate about “what Lemmy devs are doing” vs “what mbin is doing” vs “what PieFed is doing” should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that “The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are”.
      • There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and “Social Media” are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

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      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there

        Yes. That's what I said. I'm actually not 100% sure about it; for all I know there's some way to get it, but AFAIK all the existing softwares don't publish votes "after the fact", only at the time to current subscribers. But then, of course, it's kind of a moot point because you can just grab it from any mbin instance's DB through the UI without needing to do anything special or any particular knowledge.

        In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

        Not really. You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you're subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you're not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.

        There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

        Tru dat. 100% agreed. It seems like there are all these people in this thread arguing that their votes need to be private. Their votes are not private, and will never be private, for as long as ActivityPub is what they're using. I can see some value, maybe, to making it slightly difficult to extract the information instead of just giving it for free to everyone, but holding onto the idea of your votes being private is a gateway to unhappiness and only unhappiness.

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• dandroid@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How do you know who you’re defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?

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