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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Worst case scenario, there is an entirely separate, tokenized identity for votes which is authenticated the exact same way, but which is only tied to an identity at the home instance. It would be as if the voting pub is coming from user:socsa-token. It's effectively a separate user with a separate key. A well behaving instance would only ever publish votes from socsa-token, and comments from Socsa. To the rest of the fediverse socsa-token is simply a user which never comments and Socsa is a user which never votes.

I am not sure key based ID is actually core to AP anyway. The last time I read the spec it kind of hand waved identity management implementation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well hey, sounds like you might be able to help. Lemmy devs are actively soliciting opinions on lemmy votes, maybe you could have a say? Most of the comments are around "votes are already sort of public" therefore either a) make them actually public so we aren't pretending they aren't, or b) keep them hidden, a little less public is better than completely public.

Perhaps you can come in with a c) option to make votes even less public?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Maybe. I was kind of hoping someone else would run with this flag because I don't have a spare public GitHub account I really want to throw into this debate. I'm more likely to just implement it and then toss a PR grenade into the discussion in a few months if there's no other progress.