Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

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[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

But on a fundamental level, in the least instance admins have to be able to know who votes for our version of the system to even work compared to the competition.

Could you elaborate on this claim? Because I don't really see why that would be true.

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 months ago

It isn't true. As far as I can tell there is nothing right now which prevents me from sending a fixed, unique token for any give action from my test instance instead of the user string itself. Only comments would require the real user string, for obvious reasons. Likewise, another instance could ban that token, or the user or both. This actually does nothing to change the trust model, but would significantly enhance privacy and reduce the propagation of user telemetry.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 3 months ago

Because they have to be able to act upon invalid / spam / bot / brigading voting if it happens. And there is not a reasonable way to do that without knowing the voters (not necessarily the votes) that is not "disable votes for this particular subject".