Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    Worst case scenario, there is an entirely separate, tokenized identity for votes which is authenticated the exact same way, but which is only tied to an identity at the home instance. It would be as if the voting pub is coming from user:socsa-token. It’s effectively a separate user with a separate key. A well behaving instance would only ever publish votes from socsa-token, and comments from Socsa. To the rest of the fediverse socsa-token is simply a user which never comments and Socsa is a user which never votes.

    I am not sure key based ID is actually core to AP anyway. The last time I read the spec it kind of hand waved identity management implementation.