Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
Many people in this thread seem to not realize that votes are essentially public already - this is only about whether the Lemmy UI should make it a bit easier to see the votes. They can already be seen quite easily if you know how.
However, there is an easy solution to this problem. This is clearly a controversial decision, so don’t make a choice for everyone. Make it an option. Any admin can decide for themselves whether their instance should allow users to see votes.
That also means that users can decide to go to instances where the votes are hidden or public.
This approach leaves the choice to the individual, rather than forcing the choice on everyone.
Jilanico@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s confusing enough understanding how federation works for the less technically inclined. I don’t think we should also expect them to figure out which instance is privacy-conscious. Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn’t be able to see it.
If users want to advertise their approval/disapproval of posts they can use public comments in tandem with private votes.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
This is impossible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have the concept of private votes. It is not up to Lemmy to decide. You’d need to revise the protocol for this and good luck with that.
Jilanico@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
ActivityPub can’t evolve? Is there some insurmountable technical blocker?
I suspected this would be an issue and have avoided voting on controversial posts. But if everyone did I as I do, there would be no open discussions about pressing topics.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
It is possible that ActivityPub could add this feature. But it’s not certain you’d even want that. Private votes would mean private for admins and mods too, so no more analyzing votes to look for down vote bots or manipulation or down vote brigading and all that stuff. Admins and mods are unlikely to say goodbye to those moderation tools.
Even if it could be added, it’s probably years away.
Microw@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Evolving ActivityPub is not easy, any additions to the protocol take a lot of time and discussions between the various implementers.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
You don’t even need to upstream the protocol changes imo. An instance could decide to participate with tokenized user IDs. Other instances could decide to defederate because this is out of spec behavior, but as fast as I am concerned it is perfectly aligned with the core spec. Nothing says user activity cannot be anonymized.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
How would this work in practice? I upvote a post and it sends the upvote via a token user to another instance. Then I remove my upvote or downvote instead. My instance would then need to send an undo or dislike for the token user too. How would you ensure you have enough token users to fill up all the votes on a single post? You’d need thousands if not tens of thousands of these token users.
Also, this could be used to make vote manipulation easier I bet.