Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Rimu@piefed.social to 
github.com
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
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Rimu@piefed.social to Rimu@piefed.social to Rimu@piefed.social to Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just make it easier.
Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of "I'll leave if votes become public" in here. That's a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren't we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?
After the meltdown that occurred when Reddit ultra monetize their API Lemmy acquired a lot more casual users. Especially when makers of Reddit apps switched over to making Lemmy apps instead.
I was one of those people. But statistically, even the people who migrated from Reddit to here are not "normies". My "normie" friends (which is all of them 🥲) just kept on using Reddit and didn't notice anything. They weren't even using 3rd party apps.
Blows my mind that people just deal with ads.
What truly blows my mind is the amount of requests the 1st party Reddit app sends home. Back when I was using Sync I still had the app installed, but then I set up AdguardHome and saw that my phone was spamming requests. Checked the logs and found out that the 1st party app, which I wasn't even using for months, was "phoning home" literally every 10 seconds! Besides privacy concerns, that can't be good for battery life. Nuked the app then and there. I'll take the nagging, thank you.
My point is just that Lemmy is no longer made up of just Linux nerds. Over the course of the last couple of years the user base has diversified quite a bit.
So the API does disclose who upvotes and downvotes, however since the major front ends themselves don't show to everyday users, it's walled off to finding a frontend that is able to view them and to mod/admins of the instance.
Currently it takes someone to be somewhat savvy to be able to do that, this proposal is making everything public period, which would remove that wall
Yes. And I think better make it obvious that votes aren't private, instead of people wrongly assuming that they are.