Comment by Rimu@piefed.social on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

Your votes are already public.

People say this all the time, but it’s not really the case.

I don’t think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You’re proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.

requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?

The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.

They’d get defederated.

You don’t need to be federated to read people’s activities…
Even if there was some type of “authorized fetch” involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?

Ok, yeah, theoretically.

But we’re talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.

And the “we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse” is also theoretical.

Anyway, I’m already on record saying that I don’t like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.

I’m also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.

If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I’m all for it.

It’s not theoretical to se how people consistently behave when there’s less friction for toxic behavior. You should look into it if you’re not already aware of the very predictable negative outcomes that stem from removing those frictions.

We’ve already seen that kind of harrasment on major platforms including X and those owned by Meta.

the illusion of privacy

i am from the post usenet and pre facebook internet generation (i hope that is vague enough) so using my real name on the internet or signing up for accounts with my real name email acount is strictly verboten by indoctrination, so my opinion may be out of date or invalid somehow, but i can not see how your lemmy account’s up or down voting history violates privacy in any meaningful way

It’s in the mbin ui already

So the technical-skill-bar is transforming a lemmy link into the equivalent on an mbin instance? That is huge.

It’s not quite that simple. As far as I’m aware, it’s difficult to fetch from another instance “after the fact” what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance’s DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it’s supported).

But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one’s defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.

I ran curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json' and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.

In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

All of this to say:

the debate about “what Lemmy devs are doing” vs “what mbin is doing” vs “what PieFed is doing” should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that “The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are”.
There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and “Social Media” are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there

Yes. That’s what I said. I’m actually not 100% sure about it; for all I know there’s some way to get it, but AFAIK all the existing softwares don’t publish votes “after the fact”, only at the time to current subscribers. But then, of course, it’s kind of a moot point because you can just grab it from any mbin instance’s DB through the UI without needing to do anything special or any particular knowledge.

In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

Not really. You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you’re subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you’re not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.

There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and “Social Media” are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

Tru dat. 100% agreed. It seems like there are all these people in this thread arguing that their votes need to be private. Their votes are not private, and will never be private, for as long as ActivityPub is what they’re using. I can see some value, maybe, to making it slightly difficult to extract the information instead of just giving it for free to everyone, but holding onto the idea of your votes being private is a gateway to unhappiness and only unhappiness.

How do you know who you’re defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?

How is the data public? I’m asking in the most technical sense?

This informs an issue I’ve had lately with a group of three people or bots following along my comment chain (All my comments, for a while, were dropping consistently to -2 score in all contexts).

It’s my understanding that votes are not public. Am I wrong?

Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community’s subscribers.

All votes are public, they’re literally broadcast to the Fediverse writ large. You vote on something on your server, your server then tells the server owning the thing you voted on and that server then tells anyone who is interested (subscribers on other servers). That way everyone knows that this comment was voted on, but that information is indelibly tied to you - an entity on the Fediverse.

Lemmy devs just chose not to a) show that information in a UI (plenty of other software out there does) and b) not inform people that was the case. Which leads to the whole point of the thread, hiding this from users merely gives a false sense of security.

You’re proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.

Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar – that’s the (a) part. What I’m proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn’t be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.

More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users are actively running a server (it’s 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn’t know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).

The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn’t saying necessarily that we should make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it’s possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.

You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn’t Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you’re an admin on any of these systems)

People say this all the time, but it’s not really the case.

Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.

https://kbin.earth /m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites

Hmmm I see a bunch of my friends have not upvoted my post. I will contact them to ask why not and ensure that they do.

Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.

Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion

I agree with the general point that privacy isn’t a binary thing, but I don’t think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.

piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes ‘karma’ and ‘attitude’ for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn’t this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?

https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

Oof, I’d rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than deal with karma.

that’s kind of the point, other instances are already aggregating and rating your votes given and received, why shouldn’t lemmy show this to you?

I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I’d like to avoid. Tbh I’m more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.

People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things.

Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)

Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.

the author almost certainly has more experience in managing online communities than me (i have none) but it seems counterintuitive to see a dumb take, downvote and bother to leave an argumentative reply rather than just downvote and scroll past. downvotes in this case would defuse potential arguments rather than start them, but i’ll defer to the author and assume that’s not what happens

That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.

Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)

Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.

Technical people can struggle when a choice isn’t a zero or a one.

Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach.

I’m down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes

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