Lemmy instance admin snooping at votes

The votes are public. Kbin displays them right in the UI. Lemmy semi-hides it, but it's never been designed to be private in any way.

Changing instance won't do shit if that's a concern to you. As an admin I can see them even if my instance isn't involved with the post at all:

So really, I just need to host my own instance to see votes. Nice.
- Meet new friends, find new foes!
  
  What's the worst that could happen?
didn't know that. thanks!

To illustrate op's point I'm going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

Then I'm going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

Additionally, I'll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user's political affiliations and display the results.

Worst of all, I'm not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I'm spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

I'll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

Just kidding I'm not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.

Is the fact that I recognize this comment evidence that I use Lemmy a bit too much? 😅
- Caught in 4k ~~stealingq~~ liberating a really good comment
How to work out what instance(s) if someone does this: A Lemmy instance doesn't have to send the same voting data to every instance, it could send different votes to different instances (stock Lemmy federates the same thing consistently, but there is no reason a modified Lemmy designed to catch someone doing this has to), encoding a signal into the voting pattern. Then, just check to see what signal shows up. If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.
- All of which begs the question why are we bothering to pretend any of this is actually democratic or that the fediverse is truly unified across instances.
  
  On a fundamental level, this "choose your voters" thing breaks the integrity of the voting system. I understand why it needs to happen to combat rogue instances, but the level of manipulation and silent curation that is possible, without the average user's knowledge, means no one can trust the numbers they see on any instance.
  
  There's just so many avenues for abuse here, and it's disheartening to not see more acknowledgement of that from the devs.
- If it averages several instances, with enough signal you could decompose a linear combination (e.g. average) of different patterns back out into its constituent parts.
  
  A smarter system won't just take the mean of the votes from different instances but rather discard outliers as invalid input (flagging repeat offenders to be ignored in the future) and use the median or mode of the remainder. The results should also be quantitized to avoid leaking details about sources or internal algorithms; only the larger trends need to be reported.
  
  Of course you could always just keep the collected data private and only provide it to customers willing to pay $$$ for access, which handily limits instance operators' ability to reverse-engineer the source of the data. And nothing prevents you from using separate instances for public and private data sets.
Please do this. Its really not an issue.

The solution is simply to use anonymous accounts and change them frequently. This should be more publicized as normal lemmmy data hygene
- So 4chan but with extra steps...
  
  Has Lemmy already jumped the shark.

Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

Which de-incentivizes voting, choking off the thing needed to aggregate the content. Kind of underlining the problem with the votes being public.
- Votes pretty much have to be public in order for the whole federated system to work -- otherwise anyone could just stuff 50 votes for their favorite comment, and there'd be no way to tell where they came from. Given that, I think it's important that the software be honest with people about the situation, "disincentive" or not. Personally I'm fine with my votes being public, but an important part of that is that I know they're public and can vote accordingly.

Lol:

"All those account outside of monero.town are most likely angry commies that just follow posts from here to downvote."

People outside my echo chamber think I'm an asshole, it must be a conspiracy!

We do see the votes. Publicly posting them sounds like poor form, but then what do you expect from crypto bros?

Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Running your own instance isn’t going to hide your votes.

I'm curious, If I delete my account periodically, are the profile and activity like comments/votes still out there in other instances? are votes deducted? I'm not sure if this is the right question but does deleting accounts federate?
- I’m not one to half-ass it, so someone more knowledgeable than me will have to field these.
- I am not sure about the details of intended behaviour but it certainly won't federate to anyone deliberately disabling that part of federation so for privacy purposes you might as well assume that it doesn't federate.
- I can't answer your question about the votes, but posts and comments are retained when you hit the delete button. The only way to delete them is to edit the content beforehand. I believe moderators are capable of restoring posts, but I haven't checked the comments yet.
  
  There's no reason where this has to be the behavior by default; federation alone is a challenge but not an excuse. Ironically, when it comes to privacy, a company like Reddit (with sketchy privacy policies) might be better than Lemmy (a series of entities in a variety of jurisdictions where your data is protected by the weakest of all of their privacy policies)

Guys. The person running the website you use always can do and see everything

This has nothing to do with lemmy

Oh no
- No. A simple website won't help, it needs to be a Lemmy instance. Moreover, it needs to be a federated one.
  
  And then, that "invisible" data being available to other admins, is a problem with federation, not with Lemmy.
  
  Now, there could very well be efforts made to make the cleartext data of each instance users available only to the admins of that instance (and only share aggregated data with other instances), but that would also require a lot more consideration wrt mutual instance trust in the network.
  
  Right now, since votes and other actions are public (to the federated instances admins anyway), it is doable to detect and assert foul play. The downside of this is that it allows abusers to malevolently collect data and do the same bad things that you are so certain the alternatives to Lemmy don't do (yeah, as if).
  
  If the instances shared only aggregated data with one another, it would be much harder for abusive small instance owners to spy on any user on the network (still possible, but it would essentially would be as hard as for anyone else, as it would involve heuristics and lots of intelligence, to interpolate the missing information); but it would also be much harder for legit admins trying to enforce moderation to inspect what happened on federated instances. They would have to take those instance's admins at their words.
  
  As an additional note: that "invisible" data that other platforms allegedly don't share, is for sale. That's what surveillance capitalism is all about... At least with Lemmy, the barrier of entry to get our data is "federation", not "money".
  
  Edit: ~~WTF bro, a day and a half before writing this wrong comment I'm answering to, you wrote a properly worded, technically correct (top level) comment... Were you half asleep on this one??~~
  
  Edit 2: nah, the reason why your other comment was technically correct and properly worded is that you stole it (would have been so easy to give credit...) SMH. 😮‍💨
  
  Edit 3: So I checked your comment history (after seeing that other comment of yours about the user that mass downvoted you, I was legit curious how bad it could have been), you seem technically knowledgeable, and also educated. Thus, I reiterate, this specific comment, what gives!?
  
  Edit 4: lol at your edit. 😶‍🌫️

I think it's clearly available on several other activity pub platforms, last time I checked one could see individuals voting when subscribing to Lemmy communities from Friendica.

It's still against the spirit of Lemmy to post it publicly on here...

It is against the nature of information to want to broadcast it and also keep it secret at the same time.

The devs are specifically working on a feature to get even more insight into this.

I think the idea is to make it easier to detect trolling/spam from certain accounts. But honestly, there's no reason upvotes and downvotes can't just be public.
- Maybe; this feels like a "for the children", or "because terrorists" argument.
  If the whole shebang would be public i would be fine with it, but to me it looks like it will just be a crutch used to justify taking action against dissent.
Mods too next release :/

I think the main complain anyone would have with this is, only we admin can look at the vote, and no one else can. This isn't a problem in Kbin or any other platform that allow one to do so.

I only check the vote to see if there's any brigading, other than that, i have no issue with other admins snooping or whatever. Ohh to be clear, all of us admin can see the vote everywhere, getting a new instance yourself will not solve anything.

A new PR allowing mods to see the votes was merged a few weeks ago.
- Why not allow anyone to see the votes? Anyone already can by using kbin or spinning up their own instance.

Oh good, Lemmy had no privacy. Not like that ability isn't going to be abused.

Either make it public right from the start everyone sees everything. Or make this crap not possible.

You're going to get echo chambers that start witch hunts. Someone is going to dox someone because they don't like how someone votes... Yadda yadda someone gets swatted or someone just shows up... Then someone's going to start cheering "We did it Lemmy!"...

Honestly at least with Reddit you had one single evil entity that would abuse their power and trust of users.

That's an interesting point. One company, like Reddit, might see human beings as nothing more than content mills, but that created incentives to be a little private at least.

Lemmy servers are run by anybody, including Facebook, and you don't even have to accept someone else's server rules for your data to transfer onto it. The process occurs passively.

What's the instance?

Or is it right in front of my face and I'm not seeing it?

It's an archive of monero.town
- archive
  
  So wait the instance doesn't exist anymore?

From what I understand votes are publicly available data, Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the "chilling effect" where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions. Then they reintroduced it for admins so they can do their duties in stopping vote manipulation, for example people who go onto your profile and downvote literally every comment you make (it's already happened to me like 3 times) or those who use all of their alts to try and sway momentum on a comment their main makes. There's also times where there's no justification for a comment being upvoted; perfect example is when a nazi says "based" in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don't think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

Obviously admins can see everything that goes through their servers for what should be obvious reasons, so this is more of a convenience thing. Moral of the story: don't join shitty crypto instances.

perfect example is when a nazi says “based” in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don’t think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

I would absolutely be against that. Voting should not be bannable outside of vote manipulation itself. If the content is offending, remove that (and possibly ban the user), but not people who vote on it. That's just stupid "guilty by association" nonsense. And besides, voicing stupid opinions (in moderation) is still better than suppressing free speech.

Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the “chilling effect” where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions.

I find that kinda stupid as well. It leads people to think that their votes are private when literally anyone can view them with a bit of work. Sure the chilling effect sucks but it's better than misleading people. At the very least they should be warned when they sign up.
- ... really? You think that upvoting what amounts to "hey any fellow nazis here?" should be allowed...? 😒

You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That's what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There's illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It's past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

I'd like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It's also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just "meh" and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.