I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. If private votes were intended, Lemmy servers would have had voting privacy setting where the vote is federated as @privacy-vote-{sha256sum userid & postid}@instance.foo instead of the actual voter's username.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not privacy-protecting. You can easily deduct the voter by enumeration.

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

A privately-stored salt would fix that :)

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 2 months ago

Then what is the point of hashing the data? Just use an UUID.

Anyway, this is all pointless bike shedding because the activity needs to be associated with the actor, as it can only be accepted if the signature can be verified.

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago

I agree that it's bad that there's a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn't bother won't be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.