Ask Lemmy

It's pretty helpful sometimes when you can see who is brigading and where the majority of downvotes come from. Allows communities to better police themselves.

If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.

Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.

I would like if vote counts weren't shown until after you voted, so it doesn't influence your opinion

I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts

Which community/instance did this? I'd like to block it.

I mostly solve this by upvoting what I like and ignoring the downvote option, reserving it for advertisement bots and spam.
I think that having the voting record hidden in the client UI makes more harm than good to be honest and would've preferred if the devs changed their mind on tricking end users that voting is anonymous.

The federated design of fediverse means that upvotes and downvotes must sync between instances and as such they're not hidden or anonymous in any real sense. Anyone with a fediverse instance can see the votes.

lemvotes.org democratise this by allowing everyone, not just techies with their own instance, to see the votes.

One should know that lemvotes.org isn't a perfect source of truth though, when I lefthand scroll I sometimes fat finger a downvote that I remove again. The latest downvote in my record is one of those.

https://lemvotes.org/ state I downvoted a post:

https://feddit.uk/ sees 75 upvotes:

https://sopuli.xyz/ sees 75 upvotes and I clearly have not voted:

As other comments have said its by design. But there is a quirk if they used lemvotes to determine who the down voters were: it doesn't seem to pick up downvotes by mbin users. For example, according to lemvotes I’ve never downvoted anything. This is demonstrably false :)

To allow other instances to know about your vote, Lemmy federates it. This involves the post you downvoted and your account. Neither is really optional here, as the receiving instance needs your account to verify the vote.

When another instance receives your vote, it's up to them how they handle it. Mbin used to display both of them to users, but due to backlash from Lemmy users they made downvotes private eventually. Upvotes are still visible on Mbin though. Other fediverse platforms might also display your votes to users like Mbin and Lemvotes do. And of course anyone can make a minimal ActivityPub implementation and subscribe to a Lemmy community and get all the votes made within.

Up voting for good discussion.