Fediverse

Cool solution. It's great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.

For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it's important to understand that

• PieFed has a small userbase
• Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out

This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can't become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.

This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we'll be better off than having never tried anything at all.

Hey, Lemmy admin here. If I ban an anonymous account, does the account it's tethered to also get banned?

You're a hero for making this happen in... 24 hours? 48?

The issue won't go away, we'll see how well everyone else deals with it, but this is a super strong argument for your system / server.

(Advertise it. Advertise it HARD. "piefed, we have private votes".)

This is quite a smart solution, good job !

Dude this is genius

I am interested to see how it plays out but the idea of the instance admin being able to pierce the veil and investigate things that seem suspect (and being responsible for their instance not housing a ton of spam accounts just as now) seems like a perfect balance at first reading

Edit: Hahaha now I know Rimu’s alter ego because he upvoted me. Gotcha!

While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?

I use people upvoting bigoted and transphobic content to help locate other bigoted and transphobic accounts so I can instance ban them before they post hate in to our communities.

This takes away a tool that can help protect vulnerable communities, whilst doing nothing to protect them.

It's a step backwards

Nice, @[email protected], we feeling heard? 😉

Link

Great trial! Will see if you end up feeling a need to iterate sometime later!

The problem with this approach is trust. It works for the users, but not admins. If I run a PieFed instance with this on, how can lemmy.world for example can trust my tiny instance to be playing by the rules? I went over more details in this other comment.

Sure, right now admins can contact you, for your instance. But you can't really do that with dozens of instances and hundreds of instances. There's a ton of instances we tolerate the users, but would you trust the admin with anonymous votes? Be in constant contact with a dozen instance admins on a daily basis?

It's a good attempt though. Maybe we're all pessimistic and it will work just fine!

Very interesting development, I'll be curious to see how it ends up working out.

Awesome! This is the exact stopgap implementation I was arguing for, and I'm surprised how many people kept insisting it was impossible. You should try and get this integrated into mainline Lemmy asap. Definitely joining piefed in the meantime though.

You keep delivering, thank you so much!

Its strange to see one of my posts being used as a reference. All I was trying to do was share something cool.

I do agree though. When up/downvotes (especially downvotes) are fully public, it leads to trolls getting angry and lashing out on individuals in a semi-public way. And if you can see ALL of that individuals voting patterns, then we get people strategically making tools to go after people that vote certain ways. Theres a reason anonymous voting is a thing outside of the internet as well.

If this goes live in lemmy.world i will be looking at other places to post/interact with. Love lemmy (and contributed to the codebase as a dev) but I cant be bothered with trolls.

That's pseudonymous!

But all kidding aside, it sounds good

Is it possible for an instance to send out false vote data that can't be verified? Lemmy doesn't seem like a plausible target for it at the moment (and i dont pretend to know how this works beyond a conceptual level) but I can imagine a bad actor at some point seeking to manipulate voting.

Interesting solution 👍 Curious to see how this plays out!