Hi again mateys!
As most of you are probably aware, since the development of Lemvotes Lemmy votes are no longer private for users.
The way lemvotes works right now afaik, is it uses an admin level account to collect voting data from all federated instances, thus enabling the identification of every voter. This method effectively bypasses the guardrails the developers put in place to keep this info more restricted.
However, the developer of lemvotes has recently developed an “opt out” for instances that don’t want their user data collected in this way. So now we have a choice of whether or not to continue. For total transparency, I asked the developer to create an opt out because I wanted to give our users the option to choose that path without defederating from the lemvotes instance.
I think there are (at least) two schools of thought on this topic, which I will attempt to succinctly summarize below:
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Votes should be kept private to users as they were only ever meant to be viewable by instance admins. Making votes public to everyone via lemvotes, when users have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to voting, is a betrayal of user trust. It also leads to arguments and a lot of unnecessary drama, caused by users trawling though each others’ vote histories.
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It’s good that voting is transparent and that users have the same tools available as admins to conduct their own investigations into other users. This creates a level playing field and helps hold everyone accountable for their voting patterns.
So now you have some of the context, I’d like to ask our community what are your thoughts on lemvotes… is it a social good or a bad idea?
Personally, I quite like it from an admin perspective - it’s a handy tool, and a pretty cool project. But I also have an expectation (mainly from other forms of social media) that users’ votes should be kept private from other users, so I still think it’s problematic from that perspective.
Proposal: To opt out of lemvotes, so that our users’ voting data is kept (at least somewhat) private.
- To vote FOR the proposal to succeed, upvote the post.
- To vote AGAINST the proposal, downvote the post.
This will be a simple majority vote. Similar to the last governance topic, I have no clue what the instance sentiment is towards lemvotes, so let’s find out! Feel free to add your comments below.
Understandable but not what this proposal would achieve. The data is available, this is just one of the interfaces showing it.
This one can be easily opted out of, other existing ones cannot.
the proposal is about starting the process for change. making it harder to access the information is the first step.
This sort of software issue needs to be more well known to be fixed in my experience. To either increase the priority for the existing devs to find a solution until they do, or increase the circle of people aware until someone learns of it that fixes it.
This “first step” would make the issue less well known, since some people would see it as already fixed, or on the way to it. But at the same time, it would do absolutely nothing towards fixing the issue; It wouldn’t even give any dev practice towards it.
If you find compromise solutions, you risk people taking that and not bothering to request an actual solution. Take the switch from IPv4 to IPv6, then making lemvotes useless would be like introducing NAT, a shitty “solution” only partially fixing the problem, yet the reason we have not been forced to switch 25 years ago. And so, since there is no pressure, the world still runs on IPv4.
I think this is one of the cases where you want to only let the issue be fixed the right way, or it’ll never be fixed.
Yes we agree, we should take the steps to at least mitigate issues where we can like outing out of an automatic indexer.