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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Imhotep@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.world

I know, public votes, that's how Lemmy and the Fediverse work.

It bothers me a little though.

edit: this post is gaining traction, I censored the user's name as it's unimportant and better to avoid possible harassment

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[-] CMahaff@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately public votes aren't a choice, it's a requirement for how the system works. Reddit also knew who voted for what, but it was safely hidden on their servers.

Every post and every vote is replicated across all the Lemmy servers (well, simplification, but mostly true).

Server owners don't have to share it, but the information is in the database so it's always going to be possible for someone to make a tool that displays it.

There's not really an alternative - the Lemmy server needs to know what each person has voted on so it displays to them, so they can only vote once, etc. Not to mention that if it was anonymous, you could probably engineer a malicious system on other Lemmy servers to do massive vote manipulation even easier.

I'm not seeing a way to both make things distributed and anonymous.

this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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