this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.
Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.
This change doesn't lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
That would be great. I'm not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
Maybe there's some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.
You could just hash your username+instance combo, right?
hmm, how would the receiving instance verify? what happens if I send 100 random hashes?
This is literally already a problem. I can easily set up an instance and write a simple bot which just spams votes with randomized user strings. There are generally a bunch of these functional vulnerabilities in the AP trust model which are only mitigated by the current lack of scale. Work needs to be put into reworking the trust model, not exposing user telemetry to even more people.
Well you can do that for a little bit, until your instance gets found out and it gets defederated. And you need to pay for a new domain if you want to do it again. So the current system actually makes it cost real money to do this spam you're talking about.
Sure, but the detection and enforcement mechanism would be the same as it is now.
well, since the voting is public it's easy to remove your votes and block your instance after the fact
Each instance could store a static private key used to encrypt all usernames in that instance maybe?