YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I mean... you can get information accessing the database. Can anyone access the instance DBs? No. How would you know reddit doesn't log these in its database somewhere?
On it's own, it's not a problem IMO. Why would you want to show all information stored on the frontend? But, if you have to investigate something, it's not that bad you have stuff in your database that can help it.
Granted, if an admin is a shitface, they can look at these information. And then...? Make fun of downvoting people? Go to other instance and that's it.
The point here is that anyone can just spin up their own instance, federate with others, and see these information by inspecting their database.
Having a clear understanding of what is public, what's local to your instance and what's private is very important in this context.
yeah, you are right.
I think this is just a "side effect" of the decentralized nature. We need some pragmatical changes in our society to not to see these "side effects" as threats in any way.
In a decentralized but federated environment, sharing data is inevitable. In this case it's important to only share what's needed when communicating with other instances. For example, if you visit a community through your own instance while being logged in, does the other instance knows about your account being logged in ? It's not needed, but this information could leak, and this affects your privacy directly. Because what you post is public, but what you visit should be private (or at least, limited to your instance).
Why would you want to show all information stored on the frontend?
I'm gonna start out by saying that I don't know how lemmy's federation code works. So if I host another instance and federate do I only see the upvote count or also who upvoted? Cause if the only person that can see the count is the admin of the instance the user belongs to, then there's no need to show it in the frontend. If however all you need to do to see upvote count of all lemmy users, is to host your own lemmy instance, then there should be an easy way to also access that information in the front end to indicate to the user that what they up/down vote is in fact not private.
So for me whether up/down voting is private is less of an issue as long as it's clearly communicated. Again if only the instance admin the user is part of can see the count, then that's essentially "private" as you are trusting that entity already
If however all you need to do to see upvote count of all lemmy users, is to host your own lemmy instance, then there should be an easy way to also access that information
I haven't thought of that, and you may be right on this.
However, I don't fully understand this part:
there should be an easy way to also access that information in the front end to indicate to the user that what they up/down vote is in fact not private.
But it's true that my brain today doesn't really want to work. You mean by some kind of API call can reveal these information?
However, I don’t fully understand this part:
there should be an easy way to also access that information in the front end to indicate to the user that what they up/down vote is in fact not private.
But it’s true that my brain today doesn’t really want to work. You mean by some kind of API call can reveal these information?
Basically what I meant is some way for the user to see who up/down voted what. Maybe hovering the up/down vote button shows a field you can click on that say votes or something and that then redirects you to a different page that shows who upvoted and downvoted that specific post/comment. The exact details don't really matter. My point was basically that if something is accessible but only via hidden means that are not obvious to the end-user, they may wrongly assume that information is private. So by making it easily accessible to end-user, you also clearly indicate that that information is publicly accessible
Again if only the instance admin the user is part of can see the count, then that’s essentially “private” as you are trusting that entity already
Until you get rouge instances or rogue admins on seemingly reliable instances willing to fuck with vote numbers for money. A full open system does help with accountability and the ability to discover corruption/deception by admins. I'd rather have the openness than allow instances to create their own fiefdoms with no externalized accountability in an open federated system like this.
The scummier versions of old reddit power mods are probably salivating at having their own instance farms to sell upvote services to advertisers and nefarious groups to with the concept of hiding vote details from downstream instances, so it is easier to obfuscate their activities and more difficult for external analysis to discover and expose.
Keep it all open and just advocate and educate the end users to create anonymized user accounts with unique emails if they want their personal privacy.
Also. Whilst reddit mods might not get access to that information. It is definitely stored somewhere. On reddit, you can see all your upvoted and downvoted comments and posts. And lets face it. I highly doubt reddit are encrypting that information and hiding decryption keys away from every reddit employee.
I really don't see the issue here.
I mean, remember some years ago when a Reddit admin edited a comment straight from the database?
Oh wow, I haven't heard of it. I used Reddit a lot tho, but only for subscribed content. Maybe this slipped through my vision.