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

• rimu@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.

        In any case, I really don’t think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy, and I’d rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the “Open Social Web” (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.

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    • kux@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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or signing up for accounts with my real name email acount is strictly verboten by indoctrination, so my opinion may be out of date or invalid somehow, but i can not see how your lemmy account’s up or down voting history violates privacy in any meaningful way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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s in the mbin ui already

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    • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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.

        It works like that for servers because servers are assumed to have high uptime, so (in theory) push-based communication should be enough. However, we see that this is not true even for servers (e.g, medium-sized instances getting out of sync with LW because they can not keep up with all the data being sent to them) and this will be specially true in the case of a network with tens/hundreds of thousands of separate clients. No server will be willing to push activities to all those inboxes, so we will need to have some pull-based form of communication as well.

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