The whole concept of the Fediverse as social media is that all the data is public. Stop acting like these servers are giving out private data. This data has never been private, and it never will be. Data like this being shared with any other server is how ActivityPub and the Fediverse work.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
I know, but some people assume votes are private.
If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!
Lemmy likes aren't meant to be public, this is just other software failing to respect the privacy Lemmy indicates.
That's almost as bad as using robots.txt to claim sites are private and secure and just whining that people/bots should respect it.
You should assume voter data is fully public and fully open. It otherwise is in the federated ecosystem.
The comparison doesn't work because both Lemmy and Mbin are implementing the same standard, while robots.txt is mostly an honour system.
You should assume voter data is fully public and fully open. It otherwise is in the federated ecosystem.
Information not being private isn't the same thing as information being public.
idk, the label is also an honor system, if it can be just ignored like robots.txt.
I didn't explain what I meant very well. To scrape a website you don't need to understand robots.txt, implementing robots.txt is something you do to be a good netizen. But to get like info from Lemmy, implementing ActivityPub is a requirement.
Now I'll admit, it's not a great system and I do wish we had something better, but I also don't think "this isn't a good way to communicate preferences" is a good reason to ignore them.
I was thinking that it would make sense to federate upvotes, but with the hash of your username instead of your actual handle. Would this work?
How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?
Nothing stops defederation, though.
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
But they can just be banned from those instances?
How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?
Banning trolls would be doable - they'd have patterns where they target specific users across many different communities. If the same user downvotes everything I've ever said, from controversial political takes to pictures of food to posts about gardening, that's probably a malicious user.
But "brigading" doesn't mean anything and I don't respect the concept. You can't ban it because you can't define it in a way that doesn't include normal usage of the site.
Or you can be an instance admin. Iirc In the next lemmy version (1.0.0), mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
You can already do this using tesseract, by the way (not tesseract.dubvee.org, strangely?)
On t.lemmy.dbzer0.com i can see both upvotes and downvotes (for all my modded comms):
I guess the feature was already merged in one of the past Lemmy versions then?
I think it's been implemented this whole time, but it's just that the default lemmy-ui doesn't show it
There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.
Well yes, the whole concept of the fediverse is that of social media as a public service. All activitypub data is public.
Yes, but as long as you don’t reveal your identity, they can’t do much to track you.
They don’t have access to your IP.
Of course, it you’re using the same username over multiple services, or reveal identifying information (which is much easier to analyse now due to AI) they will be able to track you.
Is IP not logged anywhere in Lemmy/ ActivityPub?
Nope just server
There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!
Oof, hell no. That's some Facebook level cancer right there when they removed downvotes.
It's just a form of white washing that makes the same people who made up being offended by "black lists" and "master branch".
Edit: Y'all do realize the irony of exercising your ability to downvote a comment that is defending your ability to downvote?
Some people seem to really hate down votes. I don't give a shit either way.