Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.
Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?
They’re definitely not anonymous, and Kbin actually does have the UI to show who is upvoting and downvoting any post if you view it on there.
I love it. I’ve already used that feature to block someone who was stalking my posts and downvoting them. Then I got curious and checked out a bunch of posts on the front page that had downvotes but didnt really warrant them. I found there were about 5 accounts who were heavy downvoters for apparently no reason. They also got blocked.
I agree, I think it’s useful! I also blocked a person yesterday who was downvote stalking me, they clearly didn’t want to see the things I was posting anyway.
Can someone show me how to find this? I can’t figure it out.
Also curious if it’s possible to see who is subscribed to a magazine or who is following me.
More > activity > reduces for Kbin.
Scroll to the bottom of the thread and find reduces for the thread.
I didn’t know, that’s awesome! Downvote shouldn’t be the “fuck you I disagree” button, save that garbage for Twitter and Reddit. Downvote is there for democratically killing malevolent bullshit. Expose the names!
It’s sometimes hard to separate those feelings
Maybe a 3 button setup
- Agreed and acceptable content
- Disagree and acceptable content
- Bad content
Default Rankings are based on minimum bad-content/maximum agreed count
And controversial ranking is based on minimum bad-content/maximum good-content count (agree+disagree)This way even comments that people disagree with can be exposed so long as it’s still good content
Brigadiers who blindly vote everything bad content to maliciously influence rankings can be identified and removed for manipulation, while people who vehemently disgree with an idea can still have that outlet without influencing the community/magazine haphazardly
Yeah I never understood to pearl clutching about downvotes. It just reeks of “everyone who drives faster than me is a lunatic, everyone who drives slower than me is a granny” mentality.
Fuck you, I disagree.
Is that better?
From a technical standpoint, it’s not different from Reddit. The only difference here is that normal people can host their own instances, whereas Reddit is only hosted by the company and they can keep it under wraps.
Agreed from a technical standpoint.
But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.
I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?
but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Which kbin.social does.
But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Another potential privacy issue is that deleted content stays on server and I believe it’s similar with posted images.
I think this issue is overblown. Instances of Lemmy might run modified code and choose to save things that the user intended to delete, of course, but the default setup of Lemmy seems reasonable to me in terms of how it treats deletion.
Currently it keeps deleted posts forever to allow users to un-delete if they choose, but deleting your account clears everything. And I believe there’s work in progress to discard deleted posts after 30 days. Details here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977
When us older folks say “Anything you put on the public internet should be considered public and recorded forever”, it’s because of that.