YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

Muddybulldog@mylemmy.win to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 2772 points –
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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So no known user will ever have a desire to join. Malicious actors will dig out their votes and expose it publicly. Could be massively damaging. You cannot do that with other social media. Obviously those companies have that information, but they do not share it.

You cannot do that with other social media.

Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook's "AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post" rather than that the likes are visible at all.

I think the awareness is the main thing. I don't like and use those platforms like Twitter, or Mastodon. I assumed it was private like Reddit. Many would also.

They could just make an account that's not identifiable? Or only use their identifiable account sparingly. Or not have their upvotes be publicly damaging.

Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;).

Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;)

It does. If it "anonymized" the data before broadcasting it to the federation, usernames would not be valid across federated instances.

If I post on instance A as "John" but my username gets anonymized as "UserA893SAJ", any instance other than A has no idea that that is John, and therefore it is just some anonymous user.

It's totally possible, but that's not what Lemmy wants to be

Edit: Yeah no, in cases where attribution is not necessary, like upvote/downvote, they really should be anonymized between Lemmy instances.

I wonder why it isn't at the moment. Possibly just didn't have the foresight. I could look into contributing that possibly if someone isn't working on it already