this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just make it easier.
Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of "I'll leave if votes become public" in here. That's a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren't we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?
No! :) The most Linux I use is a Steam Deck.
I feel votes should be visible to admins but otherwise anonymized and private, or else I fear vote-harassment could become a forever-problem on Lemmy. As a woman who has been harassed on Twitter and Reddit in the past, I strongly urge the Lemmy community to embrace privacy on this issue. If there's any way to make votes more private between users, we should do it.
If we don't and users get harassed, they might leave. Lemmy needs more women. And you all are great but Lemmy also needs people who aren't Linux nerds! Lemmy needs diversity.
I very much agree with your diversity sentiment, but this part is just not possible right now. The underlying protocol (ActivityPub) just has no mechanism for private votes.
Yeah. I guess we shouldn't expect that to change any time soon?
If that's the case, maybe public votes is the best way to go.
As far as I know, there are no plans or proposals for private votes at the moment and most implementations don't seem to mind that votes are public. So no, I don't think ActivityPub will have any support for private votes in the foresseable future.
Kinda same. I also have an Ubuntu homelab server, but I feel like I use my Steam Deck more often than I spend an occasional 3-day all-nighter to get something working on the server over SSH.
But my joke premise was obviously flawed anyway. We are supposed to be, but we clearly aren't.
And to address your point regarding votes being viewable only by admins, it's sort of pointless cause anybody can become an admin, just make your own instance. This just makes your statement to be "let only the more technically advanced people see the votes", which just makes it unfair.
True, anybody can become an admin, but most people won't. I think that a slight barrier to viewing vote identities is a good thing, and reducing that barrier to zero would result in more harrasment and unproductive discussion.
I still think it's just unfair. You can lookup votes and harass people only IF you know enough about computers. Anybody persistent enough to harass other people will put a little bit of work into being able to look up votes.
In addition, as we can see, this "semi-privacy" confuses a lot of people. Better that all users KNOW that their votes are visible, instead of them thinking they are private.
After the meltdown that occurred when Reddit ultra monetize their API Lemmy acquired a lot more casual users. Especially when makers of Reddit apps switched over to making Lemmy apps instead.
I was one of those people. But statistically, even the people who migrated from Reddit to here are not "normies". My "normie" friends (which is all of them 🥲) just kept on using Reddit and didn't notice anything. They weren't even using 3rd party apps.
Blows my mind that people just deal with ads.
What truly blows my mind is the amount of requests the 1st party Reddit app sends home. Back when I was using Sync I still had the app installed, but then I set up AdguardHome and saw that my phone was spamming requests. Checked the logs and found out that the 1st party app, which I wasn't even using for months, was "phoning home" literally every 10 seconds! Besides privacy concerns, that can't be good for battery life. Nuked the app then and there. I'll take the nagging, thank you.
My point is just that Lemmy is no longer made up of just Linux nerds. Over the course of the last couple of years the user base has diversified quite a bit.
So the API does disclose who upvotes and downvotes, however since the major front ends themselves don't show to everyday users, it's walled off to finding a frontend that is able to view them and to mod/admins of the instance.
Currently it takes someone to be somewhat savvy to be able to do that, this proposal is making everything public period, which would remove that wall
Yes. And I think better make it obvious that votes aren't private, instead of people wrongly assuming that they are.