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.
I’mma be honest, this might be the worst part of lemmy. NSFW, gray area topics, sports discussion, all that becomes completely radioactive.
People might have to stand behind their opinions if they choose to voice them. The horror!
(Although the user/account is still basically anonymous 🤷♂️)
There’s a reason nobody has to publicly announce who their voting for in democratic countries, and that there’s no mechanism to check that. People can be grouped, ostracized, persecuted, canceled, or worse.
You don’t publicly announce it, but the government still knows it’s you who voted. Except in this case the site is open source. Knowing who voted is the only way to prevent vote manipulation.
What about IP addresses? I see those are logged. Are they available to query?
I would imagine so, right?
If so, ummmmmmmm. That is not ok.
Umm, anything you access on the Internet has to know your IP address, that’s how the Internet works. Whether or not they choose to keep the logs is a different matter.
Ok, sure. But the difference is that I can’t make my own Reddit instance and then see all Reddit users IP addresses.
What is the vetting process of getting an instance federated?
Like if I was an authoritarian henchman, could I make an instance with a community about cats, get federated, then see all the IPs of users calling my boss a pooh bear, on all other instances?
Edit: what about swatting?
I haven’t looked into it at all but I expect IPs are visible to instance admins. That’s pretty typical of any online platform.
IP Adresse does not really matter. It changes every day or whenever I restart the router.
It depends on the ISP, country etc
I’m in France and almost every time our IP changes it’s because my parents changed our internet subscription, or because moved to another place
Your public IP stays the same for long periods of time, is geographically tied, and also associates you to certain ISPs based on your address space. How long does it stay the same? Months - Years potentially depending on the lease set on the IP.
every website logs ip. The question is whether the admin maintains those logs. However a web server needs your IP so they can route traffic back to you. That IP gets logged so that if something is not working the admin can review the logs and figure out what is going on. Many websites that are privacy focused either turn the logging off or dump the logs fairly quickly. Doing something like that means the admin needs to take steps to create other avenues for troubleshooting that don’t factor user data into the scenario. With smaller projects like instances hosted on lemmy that might not always be feasible for volunteer admins. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing anything wrong. Lots of websites maintain logs that include IP addresses.
Err, up/down voting is just a quick way to agree or disagree. If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.
One of the reasons I really disliked Reddit and stopped using it years ago was this way of using the voting system. If I make a post, and it gets voted something like +4-10, and a reply that is some rewording of “that’s a dumb statement”, what am I to think? I’m certainly not going to change my mind, no one gave me a good reason to.
If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.
I’m inclined to believe a lot of people do this. This is not to say they are terrible for doing this, it’s that it’s human nature. Replying to someone with a well thought out post takes effort and, from my experience, makes the me realize i don’t know shit about the subject. Point is, this way of using the voting system breeds half-thought opinions which is a host of a lot of other problems.
