this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy
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I think you can see it from any instance that's federated with you. I am an instance admin for an instance where I am the only user, and I can see who is upvoting and downvoting you, who has a different home instance and is posting on a third instance.
Theoretically, you could create your own instance just to view this information.
Though, I am not a huge fan of making this information publicly visible because I think it will discourage people from voting if they know everyone can see how they voted. If you wanted to just check it for yourself, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I don't vote much on any posts or comments for exactly this reason. I wish it wasn't this way.
I agree, but I really don't see any other possible way to do this other than either having one entity in charge of voting information (all this power in one place leads to just having reddit again) or to just not store it (would make it trivial to manipulate votes). I think this is unfortunate just a limitation of federated software. All the information must be public. Even the contents of direct messages are visible in the database. I think can see every direct message between everyone on any instance federated with mine, though I haven't actually checked.
If you can see DMs between 2 e.g. sh.itjust.works users that's very worrying, but if you can only see messages where one participant is registered on your instance, that's just natural.
Other than that, I think vote information should only be visible to
and not to any and all instance admin who is federating with your instance.
I strongly disagree with a community’s mods being able to see user vote information. As a mod, I can’t even see the names of subscribers, and I like it that way. I don’t want responsibility for user’s privacy, or I’d host my own instance and put the community there.
I agree that it is a limitation of the nature of federated software. All the same, it makes me nervous to interact. I would feel much better if it wasn't every instance owner, but just the owner of the one your account came from, or perhaps the one you were interacting with. I'm not anonymous enough to feel comfortable.
For now, you should consider making some alts.
You’d probably be better off on an instance that has removed downvotes then. Being scared to upvote/downvote just because someone might want to look at an SQL database to find out it was you is insane. The percentage of people even bothering to do something like that is so miniscule.
Soon there will be 10 AI agents for every human mind. We’re rapidly approaching the point where they can watch every telescreen all the time.
I think we should make every interaction publicly available, until we find a way to actually make it private. As you've said, anyone who wants and have the means will see the information anyway.
It shouldn't be terribly hard to create software that federates with other servers, but only for the purpose of displaying stuff like this.
That would be extremely easy. Other instances could probably defederate to to not have their data crawled, but I'm not 100% certain they would know which instance to defederate from.
If it was open source, lots of folks could run a node. The data could published on another site that would make it hard to figure out where it was coming from.