I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
Why the fuck is Lemmy making votes visable to moderators? This is RIPE for corruption and abuse. Secret ballot is the only way voting works!
Lemmy is an open, federated platform. You cannot realistically hide who voted, because there is no trusted server that would secretly count up votes and provide a total.
Pretty sure votes are public. It's just that most (all?) the front ends only show the number.
It's kinda how the fedi spec works. Nothing is private.
I know kbin/mbin showed who voted.
people really need to stop confusing an upvote/downvote to basic democratic voting. There is no ticker above the ballot box letting you know how everyone voted before you, there is no "policy" or "elected position" being voted on. This is more akin to an open conference debate where people are booing or yaying when someone speaks up about a topic. Your privacy on a public forum discussion never existed to begin with, people in a public setting know their anonymity isn't guaranteed.
Exactly. Better to assume nothing on social media is private, especially federated social media.
Afaik, votes are visible to server admins (because admins hold the keys to the DB) and server admins can proliferate information however they want. With anyone being able to be a server admin, there isn't much you can do about it.
Votes are not specifically visible to moderators. Instance admins can see them through the database and everyone can see them through other federated platforms besides Lemmy.
They're visible to anyone with a lemmy instance, or any activitypub compatible platform. It's likely that she set one up to monitor the votes on the community and ban anyone she saw down-voting her, and yes that is very much a thing that power-hungry losers do.