We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.
I'm surprised most people are against public votes. Most people already seem to have an anonymous account via some weird username not connected to their real identity already. What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?
Maybe I'm the odd one out that uses my real name on the Internet and generally try to behave/vote the same as I would in person, but it seems weird wanting a hybrid account that's private (votes), yet not private (comments).
When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your "name" (or alternatively you switch to a "burner" account and do it pseudonymously).
But when you vote for stuff it's often without much thinking, and it's private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn't it's usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.
There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.
To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.
I guess I'm just of the opinion that if someone has that concern, they should rethink how they use social platforms and maybe look into creating a more anonymous profile that suits their need better.
But now we are just down to differing opinions, which is all fine to have, I won't claim my thoughts are the best one.
I have felt the want to have a more anonymous profile from time to time since being an admin means I need to avoid controversial topics, but it isn't any more difficult than simply not engaging with it.
I think this approach kinda fixes that issue though, no? You can use it the way it is now, and others can be anonymous.
I mean it would be also nice if you could log into multiple accounts and easily switch between them for each vote and comment, but this is also good, IMO.
Admins need a way to track votes to detect abuse/bots though. And anyone can be an admin if they set up an instance, so votes will still be public.
That's what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can't tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can't be completely sure).
Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user's other identities.
You need a way to identify which profile is tied to the vote profile so that you can deal with the root account.