Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

Rimu@piefed.social to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 805 points –
github.com

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

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Maybe a model where upvotes and downvotes can per instance be federated either publicly or aggregated? So an instance admin could choose to bundle together the vote totals and push them to other instances and it would just show the total number of votes on comments and posts by people on their server rather than the individuals. And if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.

The underlying protocol, ActivityPub has no support for aggregated votes.

if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.

How would you detect this? It seems very hard.

Vibes, generally. If you see a server regularly having lots of downvotes or upvotes on things that otherwise would go the other way, it's probably a bad sign and asking the other instance admin what's going on should be a way to start figuring out how to handle it. As for activitypub, there isn't a generic server to server message that could contain a VoteTotals field while updates to the standard are proposed for addition?

I don't think vibes is good enough. There's not enough certainty there. You could ask the other instance admin, but who's to say that admin is cooperative? They could be actively malicious and hiding behind this mechanism. You would ask them what's going on and they'd just say "nothing bad to see here" and you would have no way to disprove that.

As for activitypub, there isn’t a generic server to server message that could contain a VoteTotals field while updates to the standard are proposed for addition?

There is no such thing at the moment, though Lemmy could in theory implement it among its own instances, though even that would be hard. But it would be very non-standard and wouldn't work with other ActivityPub implementations.