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From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes, but I'm curious at what the community's perspective on how "private" that is. I think Mbin already shows upvoters? Piefed allows anonymous voting. I also know there are sites which show all voting history, but assuming those are fairly disliked.

My general questions to the community: - Do you expect your votes to be private, or just not shown in the UI? - Would per-voter votes showing up on another aggregator platform bother you, even though your instance already shares them with other servers?

For context I'm the dev doing some two way bridge interop between atproto + Threadiverse, in atproto the votes/likes are generally publicly accessible, you just look at the users repo through something like pdsls.dev, they're readable and archivable by anyone. In my opinion this isn't that big of a problem since it's fairly hard to look at and discern (Ex all my votes: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:lmdkqemqrqnfiix72pyjhfey/social.coves.feed.vote). Ultimately trying to figure out if there's already a mutual understanding that they are public and we can just mirror them or whether they should stay hidden as an aggregate.

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[-] OpenStars@discuss.online 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.

Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there's Lemvotes. It's kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.

Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone's vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that's merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.

The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?

this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
73 points (100.0% liked)

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