Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago by o_o@programming.dev to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] UrbenLegend@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

From a technical standpoint, it's not different from Reddit. The only difference here is that normal people can host their own instances, whereas Reddit is only hosted by the company and they can keep it under wraps.

[–] o_o@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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 1 points 2 years ago

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

Which kbin.social does.