Hi again mateys!
As most of you are probably aware, since the development of Lemvotes Lemmy votes are no longer private for users.
The way lemvotes works right now afaik, is it uses an admin level account to collect voting data from all federated instances, thus enabling the identification of every voter. This method effectively bypasses the guardrails the developers put in place to keep this info more restricted.
However, the developer of lemvotes has recently developed an "opt out" for instances that don't want their user data collected in this way. So now we have a choice of whether or not to continue. For total transparency, I asked the developer to create an opt out because I wanted to give our users the option to choose that path without defederating from the lemvotes instance.
I think there are (at least) two schools of thought on this topic, which I will attempt to succinctly summarize below:
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Votes should be kept private to users as they were only ever meant to be viewable by instance admins. Making votes public to everyone via lemvotes, when users have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to voting, is a betrayal of user trust. It also leads to arguments and a lot of unnecessary drama, caused by users trawling though each others' vote histories.
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It's good that voting is transparent and that users have the same tools available as admins to conduct their own investigations into other users. This creates a level playing field and helps hold everyone accountable for their voting patterns.
So now you have some of the context, I'd like to ask our community what are your thoughts on lemvotes... is it a social good or a bad idea?
Personally, I quite like it from an admin perspective - it's a handy tool, and a pretty cool project. But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users' votes should be kept private from other users, so I still think it's problematic from that perspective.
Proposal: To opt out of lemvotes, so that our users' voting data is kept (at least somewhat) private.
- To vote FOR the proposal to succeed, upvote the post.
- To vote AGAINST the proposal, downvote the post.
This will be a simple majority vote. Similar to the last governance topic, I have no clue what the instance sentiment is towards lemvotes, so let's find out! Feel free to add your comments below.
Against. As Lena has indicated, this does not require spinning up a full instance and admin account, but just to spin up a copy of LemVotes, which is open source. Easier than that, I've also read that votes are available without admin rights through queries to the Lemmy API. Even easier, the votes are also already public through the *bins. Just make an account on them.
I understand the use of having a small hurdle to dissuade people, I regularly build them into my scripts at work so people can't accidentally break shit with them. But my point is, removing our instance from LemVotes does not raise that hurdle to any significant degree.
This is a core limitation of ActivityPub. Votes must be sent with username attached for federation to work properly. The data is already out there. Any ActivityPub system that doesn't make them public is just doing so on the front end. It's set dressing, not actual voting privacy.
I don't like that it works this way, but I've chosen to accept it as the cost to be part of the Fediverse, to be uncensorable.
If you want privacy, the path is the same it always has been: rotate accounts regularly.
As far as I'm aware, the only true workaround is in piefed (I think it's piefed at least) where a hidden account with a randomized name is created with your real account, and the hidden one's name is attached to your votes instead of the real account. So it would require your own instance admin to see the link in vote and identity. Or basic levels of observation skills to connect the person posting negative replies is the random username also downvoting.
I also don't like the idea of even being able to opt out. It creates an entirely false sense of security and privacy, and could be seen as a signal that our instance doesn't intend to participate in the wider fediverse transparently and in good faith.
Well stated.
Thanks for the reminder.