this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Lemmy was never designed to be private in that way, nor was ActivityPub. You should expect the things you post publicly on the Internet to be public.
I expect that for posts but not for votes. Inherently, we don't want our votes to be public - that kind of defeat the purpose.
I'd be curious to know where that expectation is coming from. On average I'd expect a majority of folks have that expectation carried over from Reddit. Another poster somewhere mentioned that there are several other social media platforms that don't have private voting, and I wonder if the expectations would be different from people who came from those.
Personally I think the transparency on votes here has been refreshing and am sad to see platforms pushing to make it private. But then, I grew up in a time before Facebook, when it was understood that you used a pseudonym, not your real identity, and needed to be careful about what you chose to share on the Internet. If you had concerns about being judged for a specific opinion or a hobby or whatever, you could just make a separate account for those topics. Kind of like how some folks only keep a Reddit account around these days for porn.
Public voting is much more of an political and self-conscious act. There is a reason voting in democracies is private.
And there is also a difference if I have to deploy special measures to see who votes how, or if it is made very easy to see and use. Ultimately there should be some kind of crypto algorithm that hides how a user voted from activitypub.
I have to disagree. It should not be a consequential or self-conscious act if you aren't using your real identity. (If you are, the expectation that you should be very careful with how you participate remains unchanged. This isn't LinkedIn and it shouldn't be trying to be.)
Commenters on the GitHub issue have put it better than I can:
On reddit you basically have to sort by controversial today and lemmy isn't far behind. There is a hive mind today where people jump on the hive mind and hate wagon. And public voting will increase that, the whole idea that we need to watch out for the dissident malicious actor stalking social media attests to that. That is something that needs to be tackled through a kind of automated or extremely efficient moderative response to detect bots and voting patterns of malicious actors. Of course the question is if anything can be done at all against this shift in zeitgeist.
What is needed would be a way to anonymize voting through some kind of clever algorithm or blockchain or token or something. Or maybe that can't work or then prevent any protection against bots.