YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
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.
Activities are public and easily viewable on kbin. It's been interesting. Seems mostly positive other than people harassing those who down-vote them demanding explanations.
Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.
It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn't know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.
Seems to be Ernest's attitude about that sort of thing, he doesn't like to hide things from the average user that someone more technically inclined would still be able to access
Kbin and Lemmy are having huge federation issues at the moment, with stuff from Lemmy commonly having a multiple hour delay before showing on Kbin and sometimes it doesn't show up at all. It might be a bug so we'll see how it works when the next Lemmy version comes out.
Let's be fair, lemmy instances are having the same issues federating, especially getting posts from the big instances. I presume it's a server load thing.
Kbin is another open source link aggregation program with a different developer that uses the same protocol as Lemmy (ActivityPub), so kbin and Lemmy instances can communicate with each other. If you see anyone with "@kbin.social" after their name then that's where they're from. You can check it out yourself here as well kbin.social
If you figure out a good way let me know! I knew I'd seen this post but to find it again ... well, I used Google to find a discussion on codeburg, and that had a link back to kbin!
It's apparently because it's Twitter based and Twitter shows likes and such. Kbin doesn't really have a like upvote downvotes thing. It's like a favorite and a boost. It's weird
Currently yes, but before they started federating they didn't. That's why Kbin has both Boost (retweet), and the Favourite (like) is the "upvote", which end up here https://kbin.social/fav - and until very recently, those didn't increase your reputation.
Kbin is (was) less like Reddit and more like Twitter with downvotes.
One thing I really like is that it makes it easy to identify users to block. If there's a post stating that "Nazis are bad" and it has ten downvotes, it's very easy to use that to block future content from trolls and people I'm not interested in hearing from.
Effectively, every single person can use a bot that will automate the blocking of any user that ever downvotes them ever.
Like if I made a post that says I like Nazis, and then waited for the downvotes to pour in. Add every single one of those names to a block list, share that block list with all of my alts and all of my friends, and suddenly you have a whole army of Nazi sympathizers that are invisible to the users that would downvote them.
These hand waving excuses about votes being public are really lacking imagination. This is extremely abusable information, and cursory tools can will be put together to make abusing them simple.
I think there are some problems about voting being public. I don't think this is one of them.
I don't mind people blocking me, and if I don't appreciate the type of content people provide I'll block them liberally. It's not necessarily anything personal, I'm just cirating my experience.
Furthermore, I strive to be on instances where nazi sympathisers would be banned, and where instances tolerating them would be defederated. The only issue is identifying and weeding out troll accounts.