I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

  • danA
    131·
    2 days ago

    It’s currently impossible to have private upvotes and downvotes with a federated service. It could probably be done, but it’d need a big revamp of the ActivityPub protocol, and apps would need to adopt the new protocol version. It’s not trivial.

    Just hiding the data in the UI doesn’t solve it, because the data is still there.

    Additionally, a lot of other social media sites have public votes/likes, as long as the content is public. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn, Telegram (if you consider it social media?), and probably some others all have public likes by default.

    • npdean@lemmy.todayOP
      41·
      2 days ago

      It is okay to have public votes but it should be made clear to the users. Instagram and others allow you to see who has liked easily (next to the like button), so everyone knows it is public. Lemmy does not let me see who voted easily and it being a reddit alternative further makes it seem anonymous.

      • danA
        1·
        1 day ago

        Lemmy does have a way to view votes, but it’s only visible to admins. It’s weird because admins can view votes for anything, even posts and comments not on the server they admin. I’m not sure why they did it that way.