rglullis

How would it work? The other instances still need to know what actor is behind the activity.

Also, why? This is social media, not official elections. "Votes" here are completely meaningless.

Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community's subscribers.

The problem is not with ActivityPub, but the implementations. No one ever claimed that it should be only a push-based system, but it seems that everyone working on AP software can only think in terms of server-to-server interactions to get the data and then reinvent the wheel by developing their ad-hoc API.

AP is fine if we treat it as a messaging protocol and use it to power offline-first applications. The devices do not need to have all the network's data, just the one that the user has actively interacted with.

You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you’re subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you’re not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.

It works like that for servers because servers are assumed to have high uptime, so (in theory) push-based communication should be enough. However, we see that this is not true even for servers (e.g, medium-sized instances getting out of sync with LW because they can not keep up with all the data being sent to them) and this will be specially true in the case of a network with tens/hundreds of thousands of separate clients. No server will be willing to push activities to all those inboxes, so we will need to have some pull-based form of communication as well.

I ran curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json' and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.

In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

All of this to say:

• the debate about "what Lemmy devs are doing" vs "what mbin is doing" vs "what PieFed is doing" should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that "The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are".
• There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.

Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.

I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.

If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.

1. You don't need to be federated to read people's activities...
2. Even if there was some type of "authorized fetch" involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?

My friend, I don't know why you decided to necro this thread, but:

• I am not using this data point to make a case that I'm holding some majority opinion. I know it's not, but at the same time it's not just because it's the minority opinion that it is somehow invalid.
• The point is that "downvotes as disagreement" is not some type of "unwritten law" that is universally accepted.
• Three people out of the whole group that got involved in the discussion is relevant.

requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?

The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.

Yeah, anecdotes.

And your point is... ?

State/nation actors can easily track this information without an UI setting. Just set up any software that uses activitypub and subscribe to any AP group (i.e, Lemmy community) that you want to get up votes/downvotes (Like/Dislike activities).

There is already a way to mark an instance as abandoned/closed, now I need to add the functionality that removes recommendations from dead instances.