I don’t see much point in opting out. The data will still be available to anyone who spins up an instance, and this could lead to a big game of whack-a-mole.

Better would be to push the Lemmy devs to find a universal solution.

Hi, Lemvotes dev here. As you can imagine, I believe votes on the Fediverse should be public, because that’s just how ActivityPub works. Votes are sent out to every subscribed instance, which can then do whatever it wants with them.

We need to stop pretending votes on Lemmy are private, they’re not. By letting anyone view votes (well, they can do that without Lemvotes by setting up their own instance, Lemvotes just lowers the entry barrier), users can see, for example, who’s serially downvoting their posts or a community’s posts.

Also, I don’t think votes being public ruins Lemmy. They’re public on bluesky and (virtually) no one is complaining. Additionally, platforms like kbin and mbin, which are part of the Fediverse, already make votes public. So even without Lemvotes, people can view the votes on posts. Lemvotes just makes it a bit more convenient.

The only way to fully prevent anyone other than dbzer0 admins from viewing votes is to disable federation.

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.

Just a technical nitpick, this is inaccurate. Lemvotes queries the Lemmy database directly, so instance admins can plug it into the db and Lemvotes is running. I was considering making Lemvotes its own Fediverse actor, so that (1) setting up an instance of Lemvotes would be easier, and (2) opting out would be simpler by simply defederating lemvotes.org (or wherever the instance is running), but after working on it for a bit (the results of my work are on this git branch), I realized I don’t know enough about ActivityPub, and that I don’t care enough about Lemvotes or Lemmy to spend my time on this, as I have other projects to work on. In case anyone wants to develop that themselves, they’re free to do so! Lemvotes is open source.

Personally I vote against because security through obscurity, isn’t. People who want to get this data for malicious purposes can easily get it. It will only affect people trying to do it causally (i.e. To check if someone is a chud).

I personally find the whole voting system in lemmy flawed but that’s another story.

Votes are public though, pretending that they’re not is just deceiving users.

Anyone who admins a federated instance, and any of their friends, knows vote counts.

But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users’ votes should be kept private from other users

This is literally just reddit and hackernews, some of the worst and most astro-turfed socmed. Twitter post nazification too I guess.

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.

I don’t want lemvotes. It sounds like some real reddit shit and it’s a terribly dumb word. Not to mention I want less tracking and more anonymity on the internet in general.

Against. As Lena has indicated, this does not require spinning up a full instance and admin account, but just to spin up a copy of LemVotes, which is open source. Easier than that, I’ve also read that votes are available without admin rights through queries to the Lemmy API. Even easier, the votes are also already public through the *bins and friendica.

EDIT: Lena has clarified that Lemvotes does depend on having a Lemmy instance, and that votes are only available through API to admins.

I understand the use of having a small hurdle to dissuade people, I regularly build them into my scripts at work so people can’t accidentally break shit with them. But my point is, removing our instance from LemVotes does not raise that hurdle to any significant degree.

This is a core limitation of ActivityPub. Votes must be sent with username attached for federation to work properly. The data is already out there. Any ActivityPub system that doesn’t make them public is just doing so on the front end. It’s set dressing, not actual voting privacy.

I don’t like that it works this way, but I’ve chosen to accept it as the cost to be part of the Fediverse, to be uncensorable.

If you want privacy, the path is the same it always has been: rotate accounts regularly.

As far as I’m aware, the only true workaround is in piefed (I think it’s piefed at least) where a hidden account with a randomized name is created with your real account, and the hidden one’s name is attached to your votes instead of the real account. So it would require your own instance admin to see the link in vote and identity. Or basic levels of observation skills to connect the person posting negative replies is the random username also downvoting.

I also don’t like the idea of even being able to opt out. It creates an entirely false sense of security and privacy, and could be seen as a signal that our instance doesn’t intend to participate in the wider fediverse transparently and in good faith.

This data isn’t private in the first place. What point is there in opting out of a pinhole when niagara is right there?

I think that opting out only makes it harder to find out who voted what, I can still find out who voted what by opening a post in friendica (though it misses a good bit of info).

Giving users the illusion that their votes are private is dangerous.

Against.

Facade of privacy is worse. Opting out won’t do anything, and it might give people false sense of privacy. Let everyone know their votes are public. In my head, voting on lemmy is equivalent of saying “aye” in real life, that is, you are assenting to something publicly.

I in fact consider this to be a feature, it’s helpful in detecting votes manipulation.

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.

The fact anyone on db0 would advocate for ‘transparency’ in the name of surveillance makes me believe either I chose the wrong instance or you did.

Sure, that data is available to admins, but this approach will naturally lead to a chilling effect that directly opposes this instance’s supposed principles. I understand the why here, but cannot fathom, with how often data is misconstrued by the malicious in the modern age, anyone would operate or advocate for such a service.

This instance is based greatly on sailing the high seas. Privacy should go hand in hand with that. I don’t want my votes to be “investigated” as they reflect my personal opinions and that is sacrosanct.

Against. Your comment history is even easier to access and it’s usually much more sensitive. If you really care about anonymity you need a stronger method.

Downvotes are not a slap in the face. They’re the social equivalent of “hey, I disagree with your content or tone”. Really it’s not a big deal to me if they’re public. I’ve downvoted by accident, or changed my mind before and upvoted later.

Now if you’re talking about lemips, a list of user’s ip addresses, that’s a different story.