this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Please be aware that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I'm well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don't agree that this makes them effectively public.
By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It's not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.
But there's a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.
Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.
It is not "theoretically accessible via workarounds", it is plain and simple there on other platforms and easy to access. See, here's the votes for your first comment, it even shows the downvotes. I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the "Activity" field in the menu.
As an aside, I do think it is actually illegal to get all that information you mention without your consent, so your premise kinda doesn't work. Also, none of that stuff is stored on Lemmy's database so of course that stuff is not public, how would Lemmy even share it?
Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don't have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, people will check constantly, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.
It's not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn't mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I'm not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.
I'm just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.
And I'm just trying to explain that there is no privacy to remove cause there was never any privacy to begin with. Hiding votes in the Lemmy UI is bad because it makes users think that the votes are private, when in fact they are public.
If there was a way to make them private, I would say we should go for that solution. But there currently is not any way for them to be private and I say we should not pretend that they are private when they are in fact not.
I don't actually think that would ruin the platform as much as you say - nearly all other ActivityPub platforms have public votes and they still exist so I'm not sure the argument really holds.
You should check out the PieFed concept that I linked. That seems to provide a layer of privacy managed by the local instance admin. I'm curious if you can see any obvious way it might be bypassed or exploited, because I know you have a greater technical acumen than myself.
Hmm it's an interesting way to handle it but it should be easy to correlate users and the voting profile by just examining voting patterns. It doesn't really fix it entirely I would say.
I was going to edit my previous comment but I'll just put it here.
I understand your point, but I'm saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It's a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people's behavior.
But I agree that it's probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.