You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.

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!

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.

So you're agreeing with me that it will be abused.

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

Is IP not logged anywhere in Lemmy/ ActivityPub?

I wanna say it was built into Lemmy originally as well but they removed it from the FE

Wouldn't you be able to see it by curling the outboxes?

If you think metadata is worthless, I would like to make you aware about Snowden and his revelations. Look them up.

I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.

Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.

If you can identify all of their instances, yes.

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.)

Hashing alone if it's just usernames isn't enough. Need something like keyed hashes, but then malicious servers can lie about numbers of votes.

Otherwise you need something ridiculously overengineered like public but encrypted logs of user actions and Zero-knowledge proofs of correctness mapping everything to a distinct existing user without revealing who it is.

As I mentioned in another post: for consistency is better to have each server count total votes from their own users, send a signed & timestamped message with the count to the host of the post being voted on. Then the host can display a consistent vote count to everybody that shows where votes are coming from without manipulation of external votes.

Each individual server can lie about its count, but not by too much or else it will be detected and the server can get defederated (or have its votes ignored).

I guess the feature was already merged in one of the past Lemmy versions then?

How can I see this in the community I mod?

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?

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.

No, sometimes it is about blocking.

If you run a small community like several of us do, even a small amount of downvotes can completely shut down a discussion from ever being seen by anyone else. It's a way petty assholes have of trying to kill conversation in small communities because they don't like something about what you said or how you said it.

If someone neither wants to contribute nor lurk, and merely drag down a community, they shouldn't be allowed to continue to be a part of it at all.

Ah, well that sucks :( i thought it just used a different strategy to do so if it was trusted, not outright disable it.

Will correct it, thanks

Damn, so this is how I find out we're least trustworthy part of the commonwealth.

That is stupid and defeats the point and makes me rethink my decision to support piefed.

True, but there are other benefits too. Bots can't crawl through your likes for example. Maybe you want a feature on lemmy or mastodon or whatever with anonymous polling? (ik masto has polls but for sake of argument) Maybe you're implementing anonymous polling into an app for a trade union that needs total anonymity even from admins? It's not totally unusual!

IMO it makes sense to do this at a platform level just because there's a unified implementation of obfuscation across all the fediverse for any platforms that want to use, rather than a bunch of unique solutions that would be duplicated effort.

People have really weird usernames sometimes

Some people seem to really hate down votes. I don't give a shit either way.

Replace "hashing" with "encrypted" (perhaps just using a symmetric key that the admin sets up) and then it gets impossible to know for any outsiders who is the real user behind the vote.

I for one just wish people understood once and for all that anything you do on social media is public.

If you are not comfortable backing up your opinion or action, then don't do it.

What if a uuid is generated every time a user signs up, and every upvote iterates through the uuids?

I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already become rampant.

Nothing stops defederation, though.

Or mentally unwell people stalking.

Thanks but doesn't work if you're site-banned.

Which is a problem

That's true, but since witnessing the waves of spam that flooded Kbin before its disappearance, I try to keep an eye open for this kind of shit.

You are NOT supposed to downvote things that "aren't really interesting", you are actively ruining other people's user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.