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.

  • @ExosusEnglish
    82•1 year ago

    I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.

    • MuddybulldogOPEnglish
      35•1 year ago

      To those of use who understand how it works, yes. Five minutes in Lemmy support makes it obvious that there are many people who DON’T understand how it works. Hence, YSK.

      • @[email protected]English
        12•1 year ago

        Which has been extremely helpful. It took me a second to have a grasp on what was going on here, but it was an almost painless switch for me, especially because of these tips showing up in my feed. I still scroll some of them because of the additional tips/info in the comments

        I feel like I’m kinda back to the forum-feel of when I lurked around SA; but this is way cooler imo. And everyone’s been really awesome here trying to make it work for all of us, so quickly. I’m a very appreciative new user!

    • @sparrEnglish
      13•1 year ago

      That’s not true, it’s just very computationally expensive to make it secure and private. There are cryptographic solutions these problems.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        Good luck building a performant version.

        Although I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t built a Tor version of Lemmy/mastodon yet… imagining no home instance control, you’re just donating hosting to a truly decentralized website that nobody controls but anyone can post to. It would be the ultimate dissent tool.

    • @AncientMarinerEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      So no known user will ever have a desire to join. Malicious actors will dig out their votes and expose it publicly. Could be massively damaging. You cannot do that with other social media. Obviously those companies have that information, but they do not share it.

      • @james1English
        6•1 year ago

        You cannot do that with other social media.

        Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.

        • @AncientMarinerEnglish
          4•1 year ago

          I think the awareness is the main thing. I don’t like and use those platforms like Twitter, or Mastodon. I assumed it was private like Reddit. Many would also.

      • rigattiEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        They could just make an account that’s not identifiable? Or only use their identifiable account sparingly. Or not have their upvotes be publicly damaging.

        • @AncientMarinerEnglish
          15•1 year ago

          Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;).

          • @WaveCommanderEnglish
            5•1 year ago

            Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;)

            It does. If it “anonymized” the data before broadcasting it to the federation, usernames would not be valid across federated instances.

            If I post on instance A as “John” but my username gets anonymized as “UserA893SAJ”, any instance other than A has no idea that that is John, and therefore it is just some anonymous user.

            It’s totally possible, but that’s not what Lemmy wants to be

            Edit: Yeah no, in cases where attribution is not necessary, like upvote/downvote, they really should be anonymized between Lemmy instances.

            I wonder why it isn’t at the moment. Possibly just didn’t have the foresight. I could look into contributing that possibly if someone isn’t working on it already