i personally don’t like the public votes in the same way i don’t like public comments or profiles. Pre-lemmy i just didn’t make accounts and didn’t interact with stuff, but here i’ve tried to consciously push myself to interact because imo lemmy (and libre social media in general) is worth the slight sacrifice of privacy.

r*ddit was the de-facto knowledge base of the internet, and letting corporations control the knowledge humanity creates publicly is a huge fuck-up we can only fight with strong legislative action (never gonna happen) or by collectively moving to libre alternatives. ik im preaching to the choir here, but my point in saying this is that we’re doing small but not negligible amounts of good by interacting here even at a loss of personal privacy - only you can decide if that’s worthwhile under your personal threat model.

also worth considering that on the other place people could absolutely scrutinize your votes, since administrators could almost definitely see them the same way they can here. the difference is just that here the admins are whoever chooses to run a server, rather than whoever r*ddit chooses to allow access to. definitely opens it up to more people, but imo feels more honest this way where it’s not faking a level of privacy it doesn’t have.

another note cuz im already rambling, iirc piefed has an interesting idea for this where only “trusted” servers federate the actual votes, and untrusted ones get fake alt accounts that total to the same numbers. i’m not sure i personally care about this, since to me this whole social media shit is already public domain, but if that appeals to you it might be worth checking out