Update: Thanks mateys for participating! Our instance was really split down the middle on this vote - 49% in favour, 51% against.
After reading all the comments, it honestly seems unlikely to me that private voting will ever be a viable option for Lemmy in any meaningful way, because voting data gets federated out all across the fediverse, so I think on balance the best way forward is just to accept that reality and work under the assumption all votes are public. At least then nobody is lulled into a false sense of security.
Having said that there's an argument to be made for both sides and I don't think there's a "right" answer necessarily. Its more down to personal preference about whether you want/expect private (to the users) voting, or you want to embrace public voting. But until Lemmy can guarantee the privacy of user votes then simply pretending they are private seems like the worst of both worlds.
We might revisit the topic of public/private voting again down the road if Lemmy's developers provide privacy enhancements in that area though.
Cheers, Unruffled.
Hi again mateys!
As most of you are probably aware, since the development of Lemvotes Lemmy votes are no longer private for users.
The way lemvotes works right now afaik, is it uses an admin level account to collect voting data from all federated instances, thus enabling the identification of every voter. This method effectively bypasses the guardrails the developers put in place to keep this info more restricted.
However, the developer of lemvotes has recently developed an "opt out" for instances that don't want their user data collected in this way. So now we have a choice of whether or not to continue. For total transparency, I asked the developer to create an opt out because I wanted to give our users the option to choose that path without defederating from the lemvotes instance.
I think there are (at least) two schools of thought on this topic, which I will attempt to succinctly summarize below:
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Votes should be kept private to users as they were only ever meant to be viewable by instance admins. Making votes public to everyone via lemvotes, when users have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to voting, is a betrayal of user trust. It also leads to arguments and a lot of unnecessary drama, caused by users trawling though each others' vote histories.
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It's good that voting is transparent and that users have the same tools available as admins to conduct their own investigations into other users. This creates a level playing field and helps hold everyone accountable for their voting patterns.
So now you have some of the context, I'd like to ask our community what are your thoughts on lemvotes... is it a social good or a bad idea?
Personally, I quite like it from an admin perspective - it's a handy tool, and a pretty cool project. But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users' votes should be kept private from other users, so I still think it's problematic from that perspective.
Proposal: To opt out of lemvotes, so that our users' voting data is kept (at least somewhat) private.
- To vote FOR the proposal to succeed, upvote the post.
- To vote AGAINST the proposal, downvote the post.
This will be a simple majority vote. Similar to the last governance topic, I have no clue what the instance sentiment is towards lemvotes, so let's find out! Feel free to add your comments below.
Interesting, I was wondering about that. If they were completely public by default it might make people more thoughtful about their voting in general.
They are public, and that doesn't stop anyone being insane. More transparently public might be good though.
Personally I think transparency is almost always good. Nobody is stopping you making an account for being a creep and a loser on, but that might earn you derision. I can see no compelling reason for hiding votes, there's this abstract "oh I can support true but unpopular positions" ok well for good causes secret support is pretty much worthless and if I might become a goose with a knife for a moment: What are these secret opinions of yours? Because as someone who occasionally looks at voting patterns it is always the conservative takes lmao.
Lmao, so true!
Not just unpopular but also personally conflictual. You might want to just lurk for various reason. health concerns, pending life changes, personal issues. Or a comm that is local to you.
There are all sorts of things which as value-neutral ephemeral whims. Sometimes you vote based on agree/disagree, or based on the quality of the comment, or just based on your mood.
I can't understand your first paragraph.
You know your entire comment history is also public right? Voting isn't an agree disagree button, and even if it was. All non Nazi socmed is public, all endorsement in life except nonsense bougie spectacle is public.
Society doesn't fall apart because people can see you nodding along and hear you going "Good point" when talking to people.
It's all moot anyway, activitypub is public, everything you do is public and must be thought of as archived indefinitely. The only remotely "private" thing is PM and that's visible to any admin and any snooping infrastructure on the way.
So uhhh yeah, stick your head in the sand if you want but your votes are public to half the threadiverse lmao.
its not a good thing as it allows parties to identify and prosecute people for their views just by voting. there is a reason every democracy has anonymous voting.
votes are not private on activitypub platforms. it's all accessible via activitypub.
Also, the stakes on Lemmy are not nearly as high as in democracies.
The stakes are real on lemmy just like when voting. If you cant see this i cant help you get a clue. One simply just needs to look at the current behavior.
2ndly the votes are publicly currently its an implementation detail not a set in stone need. AP doesnt need to make votes public.
They should be public imo, for moderation. Otherwise, spamming votes with a not would be very easy.
And, excuse my ignorance, just how are votes on Lemmy as important as in democracies? I think votes being public is also useful to make people think before downvoting.
And I don't see how opting out of Lemvotes will improve the situation. People can just go to mbin and see the votes.
There's also not a whole lot of a problem with votes being public, for example, they're public on bluesky and complaints are rare.
I already address the moderation aspects which absolutely does not require them to be public. in either scenario youre asserting that peoples lives are less valuable than the moderation of a forum essentially. 🙄
there are two topics being discussed here:
In the aggregate i care less about your pet system than I do about the public voting data. I also don't see the need to support your pet system when it helps put people in danger. Which AP also does by due to current implementations, which is easily changed.
That being said I'm fully supportive of opting out of any system that tracks / aggregates votes. its clear you dont have the perspective to understand the dangers involved which is sad given the current state of the world atm and how much its in everyones fucking face over the last year between the zionists black balling people from jobs for being critical of a fucking genocide and the current trend of liberal democracies towards authoritarianism.
there is little use in continuing this conversation. our respective positions are clear and nothing either of us will say is going to change the other persons mind.
This comment is nuts.
you're clearly not paying attention to what the trump administration is actively engaged in atm. one can easily cite numerous activities where public information is being used to target, harass, and deport individuals.
so kindly, fuck you and your shit take on the shit thats happening atm. this instance hosts multiple communities that are at high risk of being targetted. including its raison d'être of pirating.
if you dont think the information wont be weaponized as soon as its convenient for them to do so you're the one who is fucking nuts.
It is already public. Every server on the network has it. I only have to go to kbin and browse this thread to see how you've voted, or spin up an instance and federate.
Please read about how activity pub works if you are so concerned.
Im aware how it works. Im saying we should take actions to limit issues until the protocol is fixed. There is no reasonable why we cant modify an instances use of the protocol to keep votes private to the instance a comm is hosted on. You dont need to ship individual votes beyond the instance of the comm where the post originates. Lemmy already has github issues discussing this very topic.
I wont be responding your inane prattle going forward.
also read this https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
Take a break mate, get some perspective. There's no need to flip out.
I get that if you live in the empire stuff is scary but you need to look at proper security models.
If being online and voting is dangerous activitypub is not something you can use. Even accessing through tor and trying to maintain good opsec would be phenomenonly risky given all the ways you could leak info or correlation attacks/tone analysis deanon.
Under that threat model defedding one instance is like bording up a window to protect you from a tank outside while your walls are made of glass.
Your submission in Should we opt out of Lemvotes? was removed for Golden rule: Don’t be shitty..
Maybe you should have read the link they posted. 😂
It does to me. When I first joined the fediverse i was on kbin where votes were public and it made me think twice if something was truly downvote worthy then I got on fedia.io where downvotes were hidden and I caught myself downvoting more and more comments that I disliked or disagreed with wothout them being inherently "bad" coments. Then here I've been trying to be more concious of how I vote but, tbh, is kinda hard to keep my inner redditor under control when I think I can get away with it. A few days ago I learned about the lemvotes thing and that has reminded me of keeping my voting habits under controll, I know i should be mindfull of it regardless but is somewhat easier for me when someone might be watching.