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 accept if a dozen people can see my votes.
That's not what you're saying.
Ultimately I'm not invested in this decision. If the instance wants to watch people vote then people stop voting truly or at all.
Except, if you're using anything other than Lemmy at this point that information is already about. The Likes/Dislikes are considered public information by the protocol. Lemmy devs probably just didn't get around to building out the UI for that before the Reddit APIcolypse.
If anything, Lemmy devs should work on methods to obscure user identities, not expose them.
One of the biggest issues with the fediverse is very specifically how much user information can be exposed outside your home instance. As has been pointed out in this thread, it is very easy for rogue instance admins to set up quiet data mining instances.
It seems like it should be relatively straightforward for certain activities, like votes and telemetry, to be anonymized/tokenized for the purposes of federation, since that information all propagates outward from the home instance anyway.
Lemmy actually marks votes as private for federation, but it seems that kbin/mbin ignore that.
Ahh, didn't even know there was a flag for that. I don't suppose you could link to the relevant w3c or FEP for it?
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#public-addressing
Next time try reading the spec before asking.
How about you assume less? I spent 40+ minutes looking for this here, here, here and here and I'm already fairly familiar having done work on two other ActivityPub based projects.
In addition public-addressing (or the lack of use thereof) in no way claims to achieve what you've stated - which is probably why it's not the answer to my query.
Right the standard is even more vague than I remember. Unfortunately it's the only thing we have.