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.

  • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

    To some degree yes. However, I am simply a user. I have no idea where to even begin with attempting such a thing, and whilst I’m sure I could probably find out, even if I did it would take far longer to learn, nevermind getting it adopted. It’s a lot easier for the people running the site and who have knowledge of how to do so. It’s like going to a restaurant, not liking the way they’ve done the food, so the restaurant comes back with “Cook it yourself then”. The other “solution” is of course going to a different restaurant or simply not going to a restaurant. which if:

    your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub

    is truly the case, then it would seem that that is the only viable option for me personally.

    And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote

    I don’t care how people vote me. This isn’t strictly about downvotes, it’s about specifc content engagement.

    And I really can’t imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

    It’s potentially useful to someone. And I’d just rather not have that data public anyway, it’s just that simple. Enough data is already public, what types of content you actively engage with and how you engage with it also being public is just a bad idea in my opinion. These are core analytics almost any site collects, which imply they must have a purpose. Except here it’s public, and can also be swooped up by big companies should they dedicate a tiny fraction of computing power to run an instance.

    I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don’t even know how we would make people aware of this.

    Making these things directly accessible to end users would be a start. Have a stats button that shows who precisely voted what. Hiding this shit in the backend is just blatant obfuscation.

    • chris@l.roofo.ccEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      It seems you have a few options:

      1. Put in the work yourself and change it.
      2. Finde someone who puts in their work to change it
      3. Accept that this is how it works
      4. Leave the fediverse

      Option 1. has the highest chance of getting your changes but option 2. might work as well. I wish you luck if you choose these options.

      Option 3. seems unlikely from your comments.

      Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone. I’d like you to stay but I don’t think the fediverse can accommodate your demands.

      I’d like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. The Lemmy Devs do this for free for you. A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.

      • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone.

        Oh no, don’t take this the wrong way. You’ve been perfectly amiable about this throughout this discussion, I have no reason to believe you’d want me gone. I am currently considering Option 4 indeed, though I want to stay for a bit to see how this all pans out. I have other issues and concerns with the fediverse anyway.

        I’d like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. … A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.

        That is a fair point, but this is a free service. There isn’t any expectancy about one contributing to it.

        Perhaps a more apt analogy from my perspective would be going to a free art museum and being disappointed there isn’t any art I like, and several other people agree with me. I can ask the museum team to maybe get some more art in I and the others like, but it’s up to the museum to do so, and I can’t make art for shit and would take years to make something worthwhile. At worst, I just leave the museum, it owes me nothing, and I owe nothing to it.

        I am generally shit at analogies though, so y’know, making an analogy is probably a bad idea.

        • fluke@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I don’t have anything technical to add to the discussion, I have absolutely no idea how Lemmy works, just that I despertately wanted somewhere else to go to that wasn’t Reddit.

          Still not even sure I understand how any of it works, although I do understand why there are privacy concerns and concerns around ‘syncing’ changes etc.

          What I do want to say is that analogies aren’t supposed to be taken too literally. That’s kind of the point of them. :)

          • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah I’m just bad at making them without them being too literal, haha.

            I’m sure loads of people have tried to explain it already. For what it’s worth, my basic explanation (as I understand it) is as follows:

            Reddit is run off servers owned by a single company, and those servers all talk to each other relatively nicely because they’re all owned by the same entity. Lemmy is run off servers owned by lots of different people. These servers talk to each other because their owners have agreed to be “federated”. However because of this they can also have more difficulties talking to each other, and individual owner’s opinions can also get involved.