this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.
(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.
People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
Your idea of a nice world and mine are very different.
Yeah, I do my best to avoid cliched references, but this is 100% a "blue pill/red pill" dilemma. The majority of people seem to prefer to live a comfortable lie than face the harsh truth.
Your world does not correspond to reality given that mbin already shows individual votes.
Head over to your comment on fedia.io and see who voted on your own comment.
Do you want to only vote on instances that defederate all mbin instances, and commit to keep doing so in the future?
Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn't mean we should remove all restrictions. That's a real twisted way of thinking.
What we have in place is already egregious imo, and a major flaw with the system in place.
That isn't really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.
You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.
You can ofc argue that we shouldn't open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.
I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?
If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?
Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.