this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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/0 Governance

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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[–] div0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 5 minutes ago) (2 children)

Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591 Early Bird: a parrot, orangered colors Jolly Roger: an icon of pirate jolly roger skull wearing a hat, in orange-red, black and white colors A book with a loaf of bread in the cover  in orange-red, black and white colors Deck Hand: An icon of anchor crossed with two staves in orange-red, black and white colors First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color

This is a simple majority vote. The current tally is as follows:

  • For: First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color Deck Hand: An icon of anchor crossed with two staves in orange-red, black and white colors Salty Dog: An icon of two crossed cutlasses with a skull in the center in orange-red, black and white colors First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color Powder Monkey: An icon of powder barrel in orange-red, black and white colors Deck Hand: An icon of anchor crossed with two staves in orange-red, black and white colors Powder Monkey: An icon of powder barrel in orange-red, black and white colors Deck Hand: An icon of anchor crossed with two staves in orange-red, black and white colors
  • Against: Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color MVP: a star icon, in orange-red, black and white colors Threadiverse Enjoyer: An icon of a doubloon with a black hole in the center in orange-red, black and white colors Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color Threadiverse Enjoyer: An icon of a doubloon with a black hole in the center in orange-red, black and white colors Vouched: a minimalist compass icon. Orangered color Threadiverse Enjoyer: An icon of a doubloon with a black hole in the center in orange-red, black and white colors
  • Local Community: +0.5
  • Outsider sentiment: Very Positive
  • Total: +0.5
  • Percentage: 51.00%

This vote will complete in 4 days


Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.

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[–] potosi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Against: you depend on the lemvotes instance implementing the opt-out feature, you can just as easily fork it and remove it

[–] TurtleMelon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm in favor of opting out of this, but not because of privacy concerns. Being able to identify how users vote would take away from conversation, as well as discourage users who would rather avoid being dragged into the conversation from voting at all. Sure, the data is already available to those willing to spin up an instance, but the overwhelming majority of people wouldn't bother. This really should be opt in instead of opt out.

[–] lemonmelon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I'm against opting out. Whether Lemvotes, vote federation, or the voting system as a whole are good or bad isn't the matter at hand. This vote is either for or against plugging our collective noses and pretending everything eternally smells like lilacs.

[–] dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

in FAVOR: even if it's a bit of a facade, it gives off the signal to future devs that privacy is still very much a desired thing, even here, and not an after thought.

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[–] UnrefinedChihuahua@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is the div0 bot broken right now?

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yes the voting thread encountered a bug and had crashed, fixed and restarted now.

[–] redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Can just abstain from voting if you don't want that public. Better be included so we can file bug reports.

[–] eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Against.

  • Does not stop voting being public
  • Does nothing for privacy, it doesn't stop how federation sends the info required to vote
  • Useful for moderators in communities where they have haters despite being self contained.
  • Useful for users to know when they have a dedicated hater/fan.
[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Against.

To block it would just further a false sense of privacy. The votes are already public, this just makes that data very slightly more accessible. To pretend otherwise is simply burying our heads in the sand.

[–] MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't think so, votes are public by nature, and it is useful to be able to find where and how users vote to make judgements based on vote manipulation. I say this as someone who has dealt with huge amounts of vote manipulation in my own communities.

Although the fact they are offering opt outs from instance admins instead of making it censorship/defederation hardened does make me lose faith in the integrity of lemvotes as a service since it no longer will show a majority of votes due to admins opting out.

[–] Agosagror@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

You can always run your own instance of lemvotes

Its open source.

[–] jatone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In favor: activity pub shouldn't have votes from my perspective.

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