35
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
35 points (100.0% liked)
/kbin meta
2 readers
1 users here now
Magazine dedicated to discussions about the kbin itself. Provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics. ---- * Roadmap 2023 * m/kbinDevlog * m/kbinDesign
founded 1 year ago
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568
This is important. The kind of petty, persevering trolls that @billothekid2 is worried about are exactly the kind of people who'd be likely to look up who downvoted them.
Kbin just makes it clear to us that this info is out there. Anonymous voting isn't possible in federated social media.
Also, even if they wanted to I don’t think voting could be made anonymous at this point, either. I’m not a programmer in any sense, but I imagine it would totally break federation. Total anonymity would probably need to be a feature from the start.
Kbin at least puts it out there so you know it’s not totally anonymous. Sometimes I wonder how many lemmy users are unaware of this because the software doesn’t make it apparent.
Actually, our downvotes don't federate out, and we don't get incoming downvotes either, so you could totally make them private within an instance since that information doesn't leave the instance anyway.
Not advocating one way or the other, just pointing out that it technically could be an option.
Hmm... I'm no expert, and probably not even competent at these sort of matters, but the thing that popped to my mind was "something something encryption something something trust". I wonder if this has a smart solution.
No. The whole point of Federated software is that things happen on one server, and by the very design of the system those things get shared out to other servers. "Things" could be anything from posts to comments to up/down votes.
The only way to have anonymous voting would be to make the up/down votes strictly local to a particular server, which kind of defeats the purpose of a federated system.
I think it would be possible. The software would just have to record a downvote, saying “we checked out this account and registered one downvote, and everything was valid”. The downvote is only reversible on the original instance the logged in user is on, anyway, and that’s between the user and server. The identity doesn’t have to be displayed to others on the original instance or federated.