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How private do you consider your votes in the Threadiverse?
(coves.social)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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Votes are not private and never will be.
There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it's better to just accept that votes are public information.
Personally I don't see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don't think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don't care. What's the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!
As a side note, Lemmy's developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn't be displayed publicly. For example, here's an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn't mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there's an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.
Some data brokers looking through your preferences and building a profile out of you, I guess.
Sure, but what they're gonna do with that is the question. Like even if there is a profile on my Lemmy account, which ads are they going to send me? How? Where is that data going to be worth anything?
I mean I live in a country whose political environment was irrevocably changed because of Cambridge Analytica. And facebook's algorithm is partly being blamed for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. It's not really about you that I'm worried with, but for others in general.
I guess they shouldn't have made votes public then... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, if we wanna still have voting actions federate between instances and different services (meaning everyone can see the total vote counts, not just the votes given by users on single instance), that information has to be publicly sent to other instances. Like I said, I believe there have been some discussions about ways to anonymize outgoing voting actions, but I imagine there would be quite a few issues to think about. For instance, doing so would probably make it much easier for bad actors to send bogus votes.
The difference of opinion is that Lemmy's devs believe that services receiving voting data from Lemmy shouldn't publicly display individual votes, but only the aggregate counts (just like Lemmy itself does). Many others, myself included, think this approach creates a false sense of privacy, potentially leading some users to believe that their votes are private when they actually aren't, especially given that services like Lemvotes exist.