From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes, but I’m curious at what the community’s perspective on how “private” that is. I think Mbin already shows upvoters? Piefed allows anonymous voting. I also know there are sites which show all voting history, but assuming those are fairly disliked.
My general questions to the community: - Do you expect your votes to be private, or just not shown in the UI? - Would per-voter votes showing up on another aggregator platform bother you, even though your instance already shares them with other servers?
For context I’m the dev doing some two way bridge interop between atproto + Threadiverse, in atproto the votes/likes are generally publicly accessible, you just look at the users repo through something like pdsls.dev, they’re readable and archivable by anyone. In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern (Ex all my votes: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:lmdkqemqrqnfiix72pyjhfey/social.coves.feed.vote). Ultimately trying to figure out if there’s already a mutual understanding that they are public and we can just mirror them or whether they should stay hidden as an aggregate.
Yup. Anyone expecting privacy on a federated service has been inherently misinformed about how federation works. Everything I do here is assumed to be public.
And I also assume that state agencies are running their own instances, to suck up as much data as they can. They can just federate with the big instances, and then the data gets firehosed directly to them via the built-in federation. It’s why AI scrapers on the fediverse are so frustrating. The scraper could just spin up an instance and passively collect all of the same data via federation. But instead, they just DDOS the instance owners.
Also, the users who bitch and moan about downvotes (because they can see who downvoted them) are pure comedic gold. I have seen users try to call out the specific people who downvoted them. Like they’ll edit their comment with something like “hey @{user1}, @{user2}, @{user3}, care to explain why you downvoted?” The only thing that ever accomplishes is getting them buried in even more spite-downvotes.