Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
1 I had assumed votes were private 2 If I don’t hear soon that votes are private, I’ll simply stop participating and return to lurking. I’ll eventually just wander off to the next thing that doesn’t expose my votes to potential bots and/or abusive actors.
I think most users assume votes are private and most will have a similar reaction to learning about this unintuitive negative feature of anything built on ActivityPub, including Lemmy.
I think it is worth reading the actual discussion on github. Having votes public and having them visibly public on the web interface has compelling reasons. Namely enshittification hardening.
It’s also quite natural to stand by your words (or vote). I personally don’t think people should feel like the internet is their anonimized alt character of life. And if they need/want that, just do a throwaway account and hard vpn. Otherwise NSA (or equivalents) track us anyway.
Your votes are as public as your posts. I see you have no problem posting so I don’t understand what the issue is.
Right? Big whoop, votes are public. Oh no, people might find out I’m an an-com from my voting patterns, instead of from my comments
Sometimes you might want to show support for something but do so privately, without others knowing it’s you in particular supporting that.
You are doing it privately. Nobody knows who amju_wolf is, or where they live.
It’s very easy to find my IRL identity, and even my online pseudonym (well, both of them) have so much stuff tied to them that they are effectively my real identities. They are very much public, and definitely not anonymous.
Then I’d be more concerned about that and your posts rather than if you happened to up or down vote something.
The issue is that currently someone can behave as a shithead via voting, even if not comments, with little fear of reprisal or even discovery.
How does one “behave as a shithead via voting”? If someone decided to waste their time following me around Lemmy and down voting my posts it’s not going to do very much.
The effectiveness of the shitheadiness is a separate matter from its identity:-). If someone were to say downvote literally everything you ever did, within seconds of you doing it, and regardless of content, then that would be a shitty thing to do.