YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private - eviltoast

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • WaveCommander@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;)

    It does. If it “anonymized” the data before broadcasting it to the federation, usernames would not be valid across federated instances.

    If I post on instance A as “John” but my username gets anonymized as “UserA893SAJ”, any instance other than A has no idea that that is John, and therefore it is just some anonymous user.

    It’s totally possible, but that’s not what Lemmy wants to be

    Edit: Yeah no, in cases where attribution is not necessary, like upvote/downvote, they really should be anonymized between Lemmy instances.

    I wonder why it isn’t at the moment. Possibly just didn’t have the foresight. I could look into contributing that possibly if someone isn’t working on it already