Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?
Dave@lemmy.nz 4 weeks agoAdmins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
And that is still possible with pseudonymous tokens votes. You just end up banning tokens for malicious voting activity, and users for malicious posting activity. It’s at best a very mild adjustment to moderation workflows.
Dave@lemmy.nz 4 weeks ago
How does this work? The community issues federates votes but with a linked token instead of a linked user? How do you track vote manipulation across different communities on different instances?
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
As far as I understand it all activity originates from the home instance, where users are interacting with federated copies of posts. The unique user token from a well behaving instance follows the user across the fediverse, allowing bulk moderation for voting patterns using that token. The only difference is that it is not explicitly tied to a given user string. That means moderation for vote manipulation gets tracked via a user’s vote token, and moderation for trolling/spam/rule violations happens via their display name. It may be possible that a user is banned from voting but not commenting and vice versa. It’s is a fairly minor change in moderation workflow, which brings a significant enhancement to user privacy.
Dave@lemmy.nz 4 weeks ago
Under activitypub, a lemmy community is kind of like a user (actually an activitypub group). When I post here with my lemmy.nz account to this lemmy.world community, lemmy.nz sends my comment to lemmy.world who then sends it to sh.itjust.works for you to see. The community is the controller of all interactions within the community. In this case, lemmy.world is the official source of how many upvotes this post has. And each vote is validated using the user’s public key to ensure it actually came from that specific user - a standard part of ActivityPub.
So would lemmy.world assign a token for your votes? If your instance assigned the token, Lemmy.world would not be able to validate against your user’s public key. If Lemmy.world assigns the token, it would only be valid in lemmy.world communities, as other instances would have to assign their own token.
Also, changing how votes work would break compatibility with other ActivityPub software (e.g. Mastodon could no longer interpret an upvote as a favourite, Mbin would’t be able to retrieve any data about the votes unless they specifically changed to work in the Lemmy way instead of using standard ActivityPub).