Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • inkweaver
    65•1 year ago

    There’s a bit of a difference here…

    Suppose I’m the President of the Democratic People’s Republic of Leopards Eating People’s Facia, And now, I want to post a propaganda piece on how Leopards are friendly, cuddly, and do not eat people’s faces.

    On Reddit, I can post this and get downvoted to oblivion, I could try to request Reddit to hand over the list of users that downvoted my post, but I’m most likely going to be told to kick rocks and I can’t do anything. (Assuming I’m not the US/a five eyes country).

    With Lemmy/Kbin, I don’t even need to ask the owner for this information. All I need to do is spin up my own separate instance and the original server will happily send over the list of usernames that have downvoted the original post. Maybe I can use this list and send out a few friendly leopards…

    It’s quite literally anyone who has 30 min to set up an instance has access to this data. There’s some discussions on GitHub on how to potentially fix this but right now this is the case.