Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't.
Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.
How do mods see them? As far as I am aware, you have to be an instance admin. But it's not difficult or time consuming to spin one up and I doubt the average user of Lemmy is technically incapable; most of the Fediverse users in general seem to be IT people and developers.
someone commented on github (I think it was Desallines) that the vote viewing feature has been available since 0.19.4 . Lemmy world is still on 0.19.3 .
Being able to see the moderation history linked directly to a post was added then - but I don't see vote viewing nor recall hearing about it, which would have been a huge deal.
Ah, mods only, and then only for their own communities - well, still, that's something (though I'd prefer prefer it opened up for everyone). Thanks for the link.
Making a browser addon/extension wouldn't be too hard if you can get the data somewhere. And then it's just a click of a button to get the functionality.