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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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[-] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 7 hours ago

My issue with votes is being able to profile users on a pretty deep level. It may not matter all that much now but once bad actors like corporations, scammers, stalkers, etc. start getting involved then there's a lot negatives that it would bring with it.

[-] nomy@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 hours ago

That's understandable; to me though, the user tracking is going to happen. If not votes then comments, if not comments the how long you stayed per page or some other engagement metric.

These days you almost have to assume an adversarial relationship with the internet. You have to assume you're being aggressively tracked and profiles built and, if it's part of your threat model, take steps to obfuscate that.

I totally support someone just lurking and not commenting or voting, especially if they're doing it for OPSEC reasons. I also don't have a huge issue with people having alt accounts for different purposes and might even encourage it, again for OPSEC reasons.

A solid argument could be made for removing voting completely and I'm not sure I'd disagree with it; but due to the nature of federation if there's voting, it'll be public.

this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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