this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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Fediverse memes

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Memes about the Fediverse.

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[–] Kraiden@kbin.earth 27 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Serious question: Why should they be private?

I know they're private on Reddit, but so what? It's not exactly sensitive information, and I can see many benefits to having them be publicly viewable. Namely preventing bot farms or people creating hundreds of alts to upvote their own fresh takes, or downvoting stuff they disagree with into oblivion.

I've always seen it as a shorthand for dropping a comment saying "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" which would have your username against it

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 17 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Copying my own reply from a similar thread last month, the problem is that most users don't know they're public:

I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.

Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.

[–] scott@loves.tech 5 points 5 months ago

And you also have to consider how other platforms treat upvotes and downvotes.

On many platforms, your upvotes and downvotes are not only visible, but sometimes result in a notification alert (i.e. someone commented on your post, someone liked your post, someone downvoted your post, etc.). It is not anonymous at all.

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