this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Absolutely not.
This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.
This data is already public. You can just create a kbin account and see who's voting. Anyone wanting to scrape it already can, the only difference proposed is the Lemmy client showing it.
It should then be unpublicised.
This is not possible with how the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) works. It has no mechanism for private votes.
You're misunderstanding what the developers are asking here.
Votes are public in the underlying protocol. There is nothing Lemmy can do against that. Lemmy currently doesn't show the votes, despite the fact that they are public. However, other ActivityPub implementations, for instance Mbin, do show the votes. So the votes are only slightly more complicated to get but not really private at all.
With that in mind, the devs are asking: Should the votes continue to only be shown to mods and admins or should everyone see them? Considering the fact that all users on other implementations see votes anyway. They are not asking your opinion because they want to implement changes to make votes more private than they are right now - that is not up to Lemmy to decide. That would require a change in ActivityPub, which would be a lot more complicated and it's not certain that it would ever happen.