Ask Lemmy

Locking for rule 5.

edit: Unlocked.

The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.

It's why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.

To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.

I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. "Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt" is my go-to justification.

Lemvotes.org

The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv

If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they're a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it's a fetish, honestly.

You're fine.

Isn't the Fediverse supposed to be open?

You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don't want to take a stance on something at all, you don't have to.

It's an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don't want to.

As far as I'm aware, the votes don't really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn't seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I've never seen a post removed because the user didn't have enough karma, etc.

Much easier to determine vote manipulation when there is no central authority to handle it and the votes, as well as moderation actions, are publicly visible.

Votes being public is kinda cool, same for mod actions and who made them.  Cool way to counter the Resdit type shadow, secret decisions and botted and bought votes.

Reddit even allows you to hide all your action history (no comment history), which is done to make it easier for bots and bought accounts to operate.

As for someone calling you or anyone out for voting certain way, who cares, tell them to go pound sand

Who cares? Upvote what you like, downvote what you don't. Who cares if someone has a whinge.

I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?

I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts

Which community/instance did this? I'd like to block it.

It needs to be open for federation to work. It needs to share what votes are by whom from where. If instances don't have this information they can't really moderate. They can't block people or other instances.

Users typically don't have access to this information, but any admin does. Because of how federation works though, anyone can become an admin pretty easily. Also, you can go somewhere that publishes the data for you who's done that work already.

I don't see this as an issue personally. It's just something to be aware of. I wish it was told to new users so they aren't surprised, but now that you know you can be prepared. Always assume others can see your votes.

I mostly solve this by upvoting what I like and ignoring the downvote option, reserving it for advertisement bots and spam.
I think that having the voting record hidden in the client UI makes more harm than good to be honest and would've preferred if the devs changed their mind on tricking end users that voting is anonymous.

The federated design of fediverse means that upvotes and downvotes must sync between instances and as such they're not hidden or anonymous in any real sense. Anyone with a fediverse instance can see the votes.

lemvotes.org democratise this by allowing everyone, not just techies with their own instance, to see the votes.

One should know that lemvotes.org isn't a perfect source of truth though, when I lefthand scroll I sometimes fat finger a downvote that I remove again. The latest downvote in my record is one of those.

https://lemvotes.org/ state I downvoted a post:

https://feddit.uk/ sees 75 upvotes:

https://sopuli.xyz/ sees 75 upvotes and I clearly have not voted:

It's pretty helpful sometimes when you can see who is brigading and where the majority of downvotes come from. Allows communities to better police themselves.

To allow other instances to know about your vote, Lemmy federates it. This involves the post you downvoted and your account. Neither is really optional here, as the receiving instance needs your account to verify the vote.

When another instance receives your vote, it's up to them how they handle it. Mbin used to display both of them to users, but due to backlash from Lemmy users they made downvotes private eventually. Upvotes are still visible on Mbin though. Other fediverse platforms might also display your votes to users like Mbin and Lemvotes do. And of course anyone can make a minimal ActivityPub implementation and subscribe to a Lemmy community and get all the votes made within.

It's to guard against bot accounts. I'd much rather have that then the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there's clearly artificial voting going on.

It's still not that hard to mess around but I'll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it's sometimes a false positive.