YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
i.imgur.com
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.
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Admins can see literally everything. If you can see it (from your end, like whether you've upvoted something), it has to be stored somewhere and of course the server owners can see it
False excuse. It is possible to design protocols that make it impossible to designed entities to see anything.
How specifically? What would votes be tied to in such a solution? Could you share a reference or explain more? Btw, there's nothing preventing any federated instance from vote flooding (with or without anonymization, since it's not associated with any cost) is there?
One example (not the only way to deal with this) is to do what some crypto algorithms have done. Here's the source code for z cash: https://github.com/zcash/zcash
Using something similar to this you can hide who is voting for what while being able to trust that the number of votes are accurate.
Agreed. I think it's fair to say that most people will consider the fact that their instance admins have access to this data.
What many probably won't consider is that ANY instance admin across the fediverse has access to much of it. It's near-zero cost to become an instance admin so the potential number of people who have access is limitless.
Yeah this information has always been available up spez and co