814
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 18 Aug 2024
814 points (97.9% liked)
Fediverse
28112 readers
314 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I think it's a bad idea. It's just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don't like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you've done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.
In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.
The problem is its already pretty public, just for mods and admins, and non-lemmy instances.
While I agree its not ideal to have everything be public, given it functionally already is, this just makes it easier for users to see. Right now its a minor hurdle, but still a hurdle - but your votes are not really private/anonymous to start with.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it's available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it's possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
Anyone can stand up an instance though. So its available for anyone to look at right now.
I don't think it should be made easier, but I don't think its fair to suggest its currently private in any way, shape, or form today.
Because it is decidedly not.
Y'know, that's fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you're not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I'm not 100% sure that's true because I've never looked at the protocol.
If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.
The more I'm thinking about this, the more I believe it's a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it's very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it's the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.
As far as I know right now, IP and such details are your instance only.
Votes, however, are visible across any instance. I agree its a transparency issue. Right now I think a of of folks believe their votes to be anonymous (or only visible to their instance admins at most), but that's not true at all.
That's really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public
Yup, all visible. The only exceptions are fully private instances (or mostly private, with limited federation) and local only communities.
kbin/mbin also make all these votes public, so you could even just be on an mbin server and see all the votes. So right now its like... jumping over an 8" high hurdle. Or doing the limbo under a pole at 5'. You have to do something, just not much. I wouldn't call it completely non-trivial to do, but it isn't rocket surgery either.