Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous - eviltoast

Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

  • o_o@programming.devOP
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    1 year ago

    Agreed from a technical standpoint.

    But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.

    Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.

    I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?

    • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.

      Which kbin.social does.