this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Piefed currently has anonymous — or more accurately, pseudonymous, voting.

which in my opinion is a great thing. I really think this feature is important.

However, while it works great to hide votes from casual users, the current system is trivially easy to correlate accounts to their voting profiles. Unless they adopt specific behaviours with large friction (ie. not voting on any post or comment you reply to, not voting on any community you participate in). And even then, timestamps of activity and general activity level will probably still be enough.

My question basically is, is there a plan to mitigate this? Possibly through optional features like voting profiles being ephemeral (like you get reassigned a new one every X weeks or posts).

Btw really appreciate you, piefed devs.

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[–] Libb@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Piefed currently has anonymous — or more accurately, pseudonymous, voting.

You mean up/downvotes?

My wish is that a user should have the option to deactivate votes for themselves and not see any at all.

I don't care to see my Account ‘Attitude’ counter move up or down, but i don’t have the option to not see it. And why should I bother? I don’t participate in a popularity contest, right? When I post it is to ask questions and to share ideas and infos with other users. For that purpose I care a lot more about reading their reasoning for (not) liking a message of mine, or why they think what I said is not correct. Their comment can help enrich the discussion or help realize I was indeed wrong in what I said.

That being said, I also know posting an actual reply/comment requires a lot more efforts than voting. A lot of extra work many users are not willing to put in. So, wanting piefed to grow, I’m fine with votes being a thing ;)

However, while it works great to hide votes from casual users, the current system is trivially easy to correlate accounts to their voting profiles

You mean realize that someone could trace my own up/downvotes patterns?

Mine is easy to spot: I don't use votes much and use it mostly to promote content that I consider useful/enriching. I don’t vote as a way to say ‘I agree’, or 'I disagree' and I seldom downvote... most of those because the poster was not contributing at all to the discussion, wasting our time.

I don’t care if anyone thinks it's worth 'spying' on my votes: be my guest, I suppose. Just, maybe, try to remember this:

  • we all get one single life on this planet. Maybe there are more interesting things to do with the limited time we have?
  • if you really want to know something (not personal) about me, maybe just ask me? It may be much simpler ;)

I’m curious to see if other users consider what you described an issue and if anyone else, like, would like it to be able to complete;y ignore the voting mechanism?

Edit: clarifications

[–] FundMECFS@piefed.zip 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

No. I mean last I was aware piefed votes are not tied to your account. You have an anonymous “voting account” seperate from your account.

this makes you think they’re private. But in reality its really easy to link those accounts.

BTW I completely hide vote counts on posts, I use the voyager frontend for this

[–] Libb@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

BTW I completely hide vote counts on posts, I use the voyager frontend for this

I only browse on my PC using the browser and I can't find any option to hide those. I barely use my phone to be honest and refuse to use any social platform on it (privacy concerns).

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That can be done for the web version by adding some CSS: https://piefed.social/post/958360

[–] Libb@piefed.social 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Thx, I will look at that :)

is this something to add (somewhere) in the browser or to use in an extension like uBO?

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

You add it in your PieFed profile settings. PieFed itself does this. Short instruction is pinned to the CSS community: https://piefed.social/post/853802

Gear icon on the top right, should bring you to the Settings tab for your account. Then scroll down to "Additional CSS" and copy-paste it there. Don't forget to use the Save button.

For example, to remove the score everywhere and the down-vote buttons, you'd enter something like this:

/* Remove score displays everywhere */  
.score {  
  display: none !important;  
}  
/* Remove downvote buttons everywhere */  
.downvote_button {  
  display: none !important;  
}  
[–] Libb@piefed.social 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Thx a lot. I had never noticed this feature.

I will not remove all up/downvote a I think it's worth being able to upvote useful/enriching comment (like yours) but know I have an option to consider and explore: could I remove just the displayed total of upvotes/downvotes (that part I really don't care about) and maybe the 'Attitude' stats displayed under my profile. Thx again :)

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The score is just the first 4 lines, up to (and including) the first closing curly bracket. I'm afraid the Attitude and Reputation on the profile page can't be handled this way (with CSS) as they're not in some sort of container. You'd need to write a feature request and have that changed in the code.

[–] Libb@piefed.social 2 points 15 hours ago

Once again, thank you very much. I just did that it's working nice :)

For anyone curious, here is what it looks like now:

38BJGM3TEG85Saz.jpg

[–] Libb@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Oh, thx for the clarification (and feel free to ignore my own noise, then).

Never heard of that. What is it used for?