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.

  • @CosmiquesEnglish
    19•1 year ago

    YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

    False excuse. It is possible to design protocols that make it impossible to designed entities to see anything.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      How specifically? What would votes be tied to in such a solution? Could you share a reference or explain more? Btw, there’s nothing preventing any federated instance from vote flooding (with or without anonymization, since it’s not associated with any cost) is there?

      • @QuadratureSurferEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        One example (not the only way to deal with this) is to do what some crypto algorithms have done. Here’s the source code for z cash: https://github.com/zcash/zcash

        Using something similar to this you can hide who is voting for what while being able to trust that the number of votes are accurate.