Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
![[Discussion] Should votes be displayed publicly? · Issue #4967 · LemmyNet/lemmy](https://lemdro.id/pictrs/image/74e684cd-6eb1-4ea0-80db-ef9d1b17a46f.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
You're viewing a single thread.
Absolutely not.
This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.
This data is already public. You can just create a kbin account and see who's voting. Anyone wanting to scrape it already can, the only difference proposed is the Lemmy client showing it.
It should then be unpublicised.
This is not possible with how the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) works. It has no mechanism for private votes.
I don't think they would ask us to vote for which outcome we would prefer if one of the outcomes could not be implemented. That would make this whole thing academic, like a popularity survey.
I think maybe some of the users that are looking at the current implementation have just failed to think of an anonymous one and are saying they think it is impossible often.
You're misunderstanding what the developers are asking here.
Votes are public in the underlying protocol. There is nothing Lemmy can do against that. Lemmy currently doesn't show the votes, despite the fact that they are public. However, other ActivityPub implementations, for instance Mbin, do show the votes. So the votes are only slightly more complicated to get but not really private at all.
With that in mind, the devs are asking: Should the votes continue to only be shown to mods and admins or should everyone see them? Considering the fact that all users on other implementations see votes anyway. They are not asking your opinion because they want to implement changes to make votes more private than they are right now - that is not up to Lemmy to decide. That would require a change in ActivityPub, which would be a lot more complicated and it's not certain that it would ever happen.