You Should Know

I've been in forums where upvotes were public. It's not something that I expect to be anonymous by design.

That being said. If something is public, it should be clear that is public (and available to everyone), if it's not it should be protected.

I think Lemmy should go one way or the other, or upvotes are public to everyone, or they are available only for you instance admins.

Bad post. Ofc the person running the server can see who votes. Your original post made it seem like anyone has access to this data.

I see that IP addresses are logged.

Are those public as well then?

Back in my day everyone knew that once you put something on the internet it's there forever to be seen by all. Has everyone already forgotten this? This is nothing new and in fact the way it's always been! Now get off my lawn!

Well, that's probably a wrong kind of 'open' to what FOSS means by 'open' yet I'm not convinced. With the whole 'anybody can make an instance and collect all the data they wan't it's kind of awkward and messy. How much of the said data you can obscure/encode without losing the openness between instances?

Because if one instance can't verify actions of another then you have an issue dealing with bots and overall the platform becomes way more obscure and less reliable as a source of information.

And like if the buttons themselves had an ability to openly show who upvoted/downvoted a post - how much of a difference would've been here? I don't feel like it's such a concern.

The point about deletion/edits - it's not about removing your info from the internet, it's about correcting what's wrong for the sake of providing correct. If it's on the internet once it's there forever. I don't see people complaining about weyback archive doing their thing. Yet it's doing exactly the same thing possibility of which upsets so many people here.

If you monkey brain posted you home address and where the keys are - it's on you, not on the internet for storing the info.

The only real point I see here is corporations/governments scraping all this data for their use. Yet as long as they can federate there's nothing much to do and if you try to restrict federation then it's just a bunch of forums with extra features.

Yes.

Just muddling around I've built queries that: (a) list all of my post & comments, everybody who voted on them, and their votes (b) tally how many times specific users have upvoted or downvoted me. (c) identifies the most prolific voters across the Fediverse and the communities they are voting in (d) identifies users with the same username or display name across all instances and correlates the activities across those accounts.

These are all for the sake of learning and are innocuos the way I'm using them. It is plain to see that someone with skills and an agenda could make more out of it than I have.

Obviously, this isn't ideal. But this isn't as damning as some of the other commenters believe.

The way reddit operates, is that they are "trusted" with all our data. They can (and do), sell any data they like, to whomever they like. They store much more information than simply who upvoted what. They can't simply allow upvotes with no claimant, they'd have no way of stopping or identifying bots or illegitimate upvotes.

This system is not ideal, but it's also not necessarily worse. We're still operating under that system, the only real difference is, we get to choose who that trusted party is. We get to move instances if the hosters interests become misaligned with our own.

Ultimately, there needs to be a smart solution to this problem to ensure it's not abused. We can't completely remove collection of the data, otherwise upvotes will be meaningless and hijacked by agendas. We can't simply encrypt the data, if there's a genuine use for it (which we've discussed), who SHOULD be allowed to decrypt it?

I completely understand the concern, and I share it. But this isn't an issue so much with Lemmy, it's an issue with upvotes on distributed social media.

Edit: Okay, ANY instance admin is where the issue lies. That much I agree with.

For transparency, this is what a Like payload looks like. The first part is just context for the activitiypub protocol and is pretty much the same for each message. The second part contains the actual data of the message, and the most personal detail in it is the url of your own profile, and the url of the post/comment you like:

{
	"@context": ["https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "https://w3id.org/security/v1",
	{
		"lemmy": "https://join-lemmy.org/ns#",
		"litepub": "http://litepub.social/ns#",
		"pt": "https://joinpeertube.org/ns#",
		"sc": "http://schema.org/",
		"ChatMessage": "litepub:ChatMessage",
		"commentsEnabled": "pt:commentsEnabled",
		"sensitive": "as:sensitive",
		"matrixUserId": "lemmy:matrixUserId",
		"postingRestrictedToMods": "lemmy:postingRestrictedToMods",
		"removeData": "lemmy:removeData",
		"stickied": "lemmy:stickied",
		"moderators":
		{
			"@type": "@id",
			"@id": "lemmy:moderators"
		},
		"expires": "as:endTime",
		"distinguished": "lemmy:distinguished",
		"language": "sc:inLanguage",
		"identifier": "sc:identifier"
	}],
	"actor": "--URL OF THE USER PROFILE--",
	"object": "--URL OF THE POST OR COMMENT--",
	"type": "Like",
	"id": "-- URL TO THE INSTANCE THAT PASSED THE MESSAGE--",
	"audience": "-- URL TO THE COMMUNITY THE POST IS PART OF--"
}