this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
364 points (95.5% liked)

Fediverse

30303 readers
748 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Who cares? If your upvote or downvote or any other activity you deliberately perform on a public platform is something you're embarrassed about and wouldn't be willing to do in a face to face engagement you probably shouldn't be doing it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

I agree, and if you absolutely must, then maybe make an alt?

The main problem is most people assume their votes are private, as they are private on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I know, but some people assume votes are private.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (8 children)

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!

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's not good practice. Really one shouldn't be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That's why Lemmy has local-only communities, the "private" community aspect that many people want just won't be federated, because you can't make something like this private otherwise.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

This isn't just a Frendica thing; you can see this from Mastodon, mbin/kbin, etc. Many people seem to think upvotes and downvotes are private, but the reality is that they're publicly available information by default in ActivityPub. Lemmy just hides the information on the front-end for "normal" users; If you're a moderator you can clearly see everything.

If one wants truly pseudonymous voting, they're free to try out PieFed. See the announcement post for this feature for more details.

[–] [email protected] 96 points 5 days ago (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 5 days ago (14 children)

Well yes, the whole concept of the fediverse is that of social media as a public service. All activitypub data is public.

load more comments (14 replies)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

My name is actually Ricky Rigatoni and I am King of the Brooklyn Mafia.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (2 children)

This feature has been available to all kbin/Mbin users since the beginning, btw.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

This is nothing new. Fire up any ActivityPub server and you can see everything over the wire. As a Lemmy admin of my server of just me, I can also see it in the UI.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 71 points 5 days ago (8 children)

Yes, after all other servers need this information in order to prevent double voting, you can't just have servers sending each other information "somebody upvoted this" and also tell when servers are allowing users to vote more than once.

So upvotes and downvotes aren't actually private, never have been, some servers may display them publicly even if most don't.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The server hosting the post needs it.

It only needs to tell other servers the vote count, and the votes of people on that other server.
That may not be how it actually works, but that's all that's needed

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Yes, but then you can have malicious servers sending fake numbers without other server operators being able to check whether this is at all plausible.

(It's still possible for malicious servers to send fake votes, but server operators can see which users they are stated to originate from, then block that server if that looks like it's doing that. At least that is my understanding.)

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Petty mods or users would abuse this

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

It's already possible to see if you really want to look. Friendica is just another way.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Mods can already see voting data, at least through the API on the latest version of Lemmy.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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):

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I mod a small community with like 6 monthly users, I'm the only one who post or comment and the average post have 3/4 upvotes and 1 downvote. And I always ask myself who is downvoting my submissions, because it's make no sense to me that someone take the job of pressing the downvote button on a link to a EDM set. Couldn't they just block the community?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/home/all/scaled to show downvotes

Assess whether banning makes sense for someone who only downvotes content

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I've gone to my community and to specific posts, but can't work out how to show downvotes. Can you shed a little light on how to see them please?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

How exactly can I see who downvoted? Can't seem to find it in the regular view, and the debug info only shows the vote count, not the voter.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (5 children)

I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can't be identified across posts

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure about the downvotes part (i failed to recreate this lmao) but you can already view upvotes with mbin. Piefed solves this problem with a option to make your votes private but only with untrusted instances (but from my tests it didn't work? weird)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago (10 children)

IIRC, piefed's private votes are disabled for "trusted" instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›