We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn’t).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I’ve done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let’s see how it goes.
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This is quite a smart solution, good job !
Hey, Lemmy admin here. If I ban an anonymous account, does the account it’s tethered to also get banned?
Do you ben based on voting behaviour?
If the same account is voting in the same direction on every single post and comment in an entire community in a matter of seconds while contributing neither posts nor comments? Yes, vote manipulation.
If one user is following another around, down voting their content across a wide range of topics? Yes, targeted harassment.
I think a ban based on those criteria should apply to main acct but I’m not sure how it’s implemented.
I use people upvoting bigoted and transphobic content to help locate other bigoted and transphobic accounts so I can instance ban them before they post hate in to our communities.
This takes away a tool that can help protect vulnerable communities, whilst doing nothing to protect them.
It’s a step backwards
whilst doing nothing to protect them
Well it also takes away a tool that harassers can use for their harassing of individuals, right? This does highlight the often-requested issue of Lemmy needs better/more moderation tools though.
Very interesting development, I’ll be curious to see how it ends up working out.
Is it possible for an instance to send out false vote data that can’t be verified? Lemmy doesn’t seem like a plausible target for it at the moment (and i dont pretend to know how this works beyond a conceptual level) but I can imagine a bad actor at some point seeking to manipulate voting.
Yes, a fake instance can spam votes over federation. But usually it’s pretty obvious and easy to block.
I guess that can happen now anyway as the bad actor can just create their own instance with as many fake accounts as they like. Ultimately it’s still on other instance admins to block the dodgy ones either way.
Interesting solution 👍 Curious to see how this plays out!
Cool solution. It’s great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.
For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it’s important to understand that
- PieFed has a small userbase
- Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out
This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can’t become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.
This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we’ll be better off than having never tried anything at all.
Just upvoted myself but nobody else knows 🤫
Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it’s harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.
I’ve seen posts being downvoted by user@instancea, user@instanceb, username@instancec etc. this will make tracking that kind of abuse much more difficult.
Look mom, I’m famous!
Why do you downvote all the stuff anyways?
Dude this is genius
I am interested to see how it plays out but the idea of the instance admin being able to pierce the veil and investigate things that seem suspect (and being responsible for their instance not housing a ton of spam accounts just as now) seems like a perfect balance at first reading
Neat
@rimu is there a forum style ap implementation that can talk to lemmy communities (I’m assuming that piefed can) without voting?
I believe NodeBB is what you’re looking for . https://community.nodebb.org/
@Dame Ty!
Its strange to see one of my posts being used as a reference. All I was trying to do was share something cool.
I do agree though. When up/downvotes (especially downvotes) are fully public, it leads to trolls getting angry and lashing out on individuals in a semi-public way. And if you can see ALL of that individuals voting patterns, then we get people strategically making tools to go after people that vote certain ways. Theres a reason anonymous voting is a thing outside of the internet as well.
If this goes live in lemmy.world i will be looking at other places to post/interact with. Love lemmy (and contributed to the codebase as a dev) but I cant be bothered with trolls.
It’s vice versa. In the old good times there was a saying “don’t feed the troll”. Just block him. Downvoting is just a cheap solution for people who cannot justify their argument. Btw, I love to read downvoted comments which are by default ‘hidden’. Most of them are trash but sometimes it’s a valid point but not the very popular one
I’m not sure what you are suggesting. Are you suggesting never using downvotes?
Yes, exactly my thoughts on this. Downvoting is only a measure of crowd censorship based on opinion popularity. If you see some trolls, just block them but don’t hide their posts for other ones who may think on that person views otherwise
Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.
Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.
Millions flies cannot be mistaken. Democratic mob cannot be mistaken. Mobs have never lynched anybody. How ignorant you are in your ego with your “whining” argument
