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2mo ago

YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

373 comments

Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?
- Would be my question as well. It seems quite obvious that if you participate in publicly viewable discussion, that the stuff you do is publicly viewable.
  If you don't want it associated to your physical person, use a VPN and unidentifiable account name.
  (And the statement "at least reddit is safe" seems absolutely ridiculous to me.)
  
  Reddit is safer than Lemmy. There cannot be witchhunts on lurkers. IP info is not accessible to anyone but the company.
- dude is just bent out of shape because they got called out for disagreeing Russia should go home and leave Ukraine alone.
  https://lemmy.world/comment/18706617
  
  I mean it is kind of a dick move to spy on downvotes and then demand that someone respond to you. The dude is wrong as hell, but I do agree with the overall principle that not every vote needs to be subject to someone getting interrogated as to why they voted that way.
  Their shock at finding out that it works that way is, of course, why the currently Lemmy UI is badly designed because it creates the illusion for people that their votes are private. They definitely should not do that.
  
  I am not bent out of shape. I said what I said and I stand by it. I am surprised about the public nature of my votes.
  
  You’re not accurately representing what they said.
  this could easily be solved.
  Russia go home. Leave Ukraine.
  …is on par with telling people to “get a higher-paying job” to fix their finances or “just get friends” to solve loneliness. I don’t downvote a comment like this because it wouldn’t solve the issue, but because the proposed “solution” is completely out of touch with reality.
  Good rule of thumb for online discussion: if someone offers a simple solution to a complex problem, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about.
- I feel hat posts/comments are much more of a privacy exposure than any vote.
  If the OP wants private voting vs their post/comments then two account would be the solution to that - this is how it is done in the backend on piefed
  
  Also if only voting is so bad, just don't vote. Those votes are not used for anything but ranking in lists for others, you'll not see any difference for yourself if you stop voting.
  
  If you're a lurker who votes, voting would be your only exposure.
  
  Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
  Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)
- Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
  Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)
  
  Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
  Says who? Voting/likes are public on a lot of social media sites, as long as the content itself is public. The only mainstream ones I can think of where it's not are YouTube and reddit.
  
  person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public.
  Yes.
  Voting is meant to be anonymous
  No.
  
  That is not true. Most votes irl are in fact public to the audience. Did you ever participate in a democratically organized group? Local council votes are usually done by raising hands. Votes in HOA meetings are usually done by raising hands. Your sports club deciding on a new executive and treasurer? Guess what. Raising hands.
  
  On most social media the voting is public, see Facebook/Twitter likes. Hell back in the days of forums you could usually see the list of users that liked a given thread in most of the forum software I ever used. Reddit was the anomaly really
  I think piefed has a feature where your votes never leave your instance, so are not exposed in this way (but obviously only appear on your home instance too)
  Agree that it should be clearer to people coming from Reddit that that's how it works though.

Why are you saying IP addresses are publicly shown here and why is (almost) no one correcting you? That would've been an enormous privacy risk that would've required intentionally fucking users over. Just doesn't even make sense to write what you did about IP addresses. Seems like you're just hoping to cause some panic.
- Admins can get them. It is not available to everyone.
  
  Only the admin of your instance can see your IP address, it doesn't get federated to other instances.
  
  Who says that Reddit isn't selling upvote/downvote and IP info? Or sharing with govts?
  
  Okay so then why fearmonger? You're thinking that a handful of people in the world having your IP and also opinions is somehow more dangerous than anything else on the Internet?
  
  Only admins of your instance.

Don't tell anyone, but your posts and comments are also public.
- Only you can see this comment Daniskarma. The Leering League of Lemmy SEES you Daniskarma and we have taken notice. Cease your efforts to spread information about public posts and comments, or ELSE Daniskarma. We're watching you.
  
  Why is this comment completely empty?
- I know you are being sarcastic and edgy but point is that voting is assumed to be private by the average person because it is anonymous in elections, it is anonymous on the closest social platform Reddit and popular websites like youtube.
  
  I don't know how to break this... But voting in Lemmy is not choosing a president.
  Voting is like booing or clapping in a public agora. It's not private. If you assume is private that's on you.
  Not even on your beloved reddit. Reddit admins know all your votes.
  
  And reddit also has a problen where you can use bots to farm upvotes and because you cant see that information means you cant tell if posts are legit or propaganda
  
  It's a federated platform. How could voting have been anonymous?
  Besides, nothing requires you to vote on posts. If you're not comfortable voting, then don't vote.

While it is important to know that voting is not private (nor truly is direct messaging), that is not in itself a danger.
Lemmy is community driven, and so it is — broadly speaking — governed by community norms and the platform is responsive to the needs of those norms. If someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an admin. I've seen people called out for the use of vote manipulation, but I'm not sure what it would look like to be targeted based on your votes.
By the way, there are also mechanisms for publicly addressing grievances with mods and admins.
Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here. Reddit uses dark patterns to manipulate users into equating votes with worthiness. Having a lot of karma on reddit contributes to a person's reputation and credibility there. Here, no one cares, or even sees, a person's vote totals. Like most everything else, it's technically public, but it's not visible or indicated.
Why does reddit want you to care about your karma? For engagement and metrics. If people are only incentivized to share genuine interests and human interaction, then they won't scroll mindlessly for quite as long. If every post and comment is incentivized for maximum virality, then Reddit can sell more eyeballs to advertisers. Plus, if people care enough about their fake points, they will literally pay to buy reputation. Reddit doesn't care about your well-being, just your ad impressions. Like any other social media corp.
Welcome to a better, healthier, more transparent place. We are far from perfect, but no one here will use dark patterns to mine you for content.
- if someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an amin.
  this is a highly demanding solution for a misbehavior that takes very little energy to engage in. at least in my experience with admins, even when you have an effective one that doesn't mean they will be effective in the coming months or years. ultimately a lot of people will end up having to explain somebody else's bad behavior to another who just might not care.
  but never mind that. what I've actually got to wonder is what does having votes public even accomplish positively? is the goal to help users understand each other based on actions we made that up to this point we thought were anonymous?
  
  Votes are public more of a side effect of the fact that Lemmy is federated, rather than intentionally as something to be publicly visible, I don't believe you can go find someone's vote history just from the normal Lemmy ui, but someone could create their own Lemmy/mastodon/kbin version (or just some custom scraper that speaks activity pub and pretends to be one of these) to start collecting vote counts.
  Votes being tied to accounts makes it slightly harder to do vote manipulation, but only slightly. It would be as simple as having my server tell the server of the original post that 5000 users that totally exist voted on this post. Of course you could do the same by actually creating 5000 fake accounts on your server, but that's marginally more work, and also slightly more detectable. There's a lot of trust in the activity pub protocol.
  
  There have been a lot of discussions about whether voting on Lemmy should be public. Some threadiverse platforms actually take the step of displaying votes and reactions publicly for that very reason.
  I won't attempt to recap those discussions here, but you may be able to search for them.
- Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here.
  Oh but they do.
  It also informs how comments are sorted under each post (unless you choose New or Old by default).
  IMHO the voting system is the best part of both reddit and lemmy: it gives certain powers to the majority. It gives a rough picture of how other people - even those that do not comment - feel about opinions.
  edit: lol, even you do
  
  Voting functions completely differently between the two sites. I didn't say that voting doesn't matter, I said that no one cares about the "points."
  People can and do use voting to let others know about interesting content or to express displeasure at seeing a post (which is why it is sometimes surprising to see any downvotes on certain posts such as the nice one I was responding to in the screenshot).
  What people don't use them for is a measure of merit or reputation. Voting here functions much more like reddit used to years ago. It helps sort content by what people want to see.
- I took it up with a mod. They said it is public information. That is how I learned about it. Mods won’t do shit if they favor the abuser.

I like piefed because it lets you see at a glance if someone is a serial downvoter. On each piefed user profile is a thing called “attitude” and it’s a ratio of your upvotes vs downvotes. ~~100% means the person doesn’t downvote people. 50% means they downvote and upvote equally. 0% is only downvotes.~~ Edit: I saw someone today with negative % so it must be 100% is all upvotes. 0% is half upvotes half downvotes. -100% is all downvotes.
It shows up for people outside piefed too so i see you too lemmy angry people.
- I would never downvote cereal.
  Unless it was grape nuts. That shit is like eating gravel.
  
  Here's how you Grape Nut:
  Pour a small pile (like a cup or so) in a bowl.
  Take a spoonful of peanut butter and use the backside of the spoon to mix up the PB and GN. Smash it together for longer than you think until it's well mixed.
  Top with a drizzle of honey and then pour milk over it.
  S-tier breakfast.
  
  Raisin bran gang!
- What is mine?
  
  90%
- This just sounds like Reddit account karma score all over again? But with a percentage displayed instead of total.
  
  Reddit karma is how others feel about what you say. Piefed’s attitude is how you feel about what other people say.
  Slightly different but i see your point.
- oh no. I should upvote more. I'm really bad about voting at all 😓
  
  Why would you let others police your behavior?

Russia really should just leave Ukraine, though. (Sorry, I just saw the context for this a few minutes ago and can't help myself).
- Dont care who knows but I too agree with this.
- It is not the context for this post, people have made it the context. It is the reason for this post.
  
  Maybe context is the wrong word.
  E: how about catalyst.

at least Reddit is safe.
Lmao, what!? Reddit tries their best to know exactly who you are, where you live, your education, where you work, etc... And then they sell that data to anyone.
- Yes, exactly! This is just what they hoard on iOS devices:
  
  You are confusing privacy and security
- They have that data, true. But they don’t harass me.

I don’t think IP addresses federate? I think only your instance admin can see your IP address. In any case, though, you should generally always assume that your up/down votes on any service are recorded and tied to your username. If you can come back later and change your vote, that vote is tied to your username. It may not be visible to other users, but the server admins can absolutely see what you’re doing.
Reddit might not make your votes publicly visible, but they’re absolutely tracking them and using that information to select what you see, including advertising. They might not directly share those votes with advertisers, but they almost certainly are sharing your interests based on your votes. And you should assume Reddit and others will comply if the government comes asking for what users liked a post the government opposes, or who downvoted a post praising a new government initiative.
It depends on your threat model, but your threat model might change. Freedom of speech might be curtailed by politicians even when that’s supposed to be unconstitutional. What might be safe to do online now might become unsafe in a year or two.
YSK: every action you take online, even as simple as an Upvote or Like, might be recorded and may come back to haunt you
- Reddit is one entity, and by providing a service it is bound by a variety of privacy and data protection regulations. On the fediverse anyone can accumulate any of that information and store it for years, and they are not bound by any such data management or privacy laws. It's absolutely shocking to me that a place which is otherwise quite obsessed with privacy just brushes aside this distinction. As it stands a vote on the fediverse is far more likely to have real consequences versus one on reddit if, say, ones phone is searched at a border.
  This could be mitigated considerably with simple voting agents, as piefed tried to do, but this idea was killed by idiotic forum politics over fears of "vote manipulation."
  Yes, this is not hyperbole - the otherwise "privacy focused" leaders of the fediverse are more concerned with fake Internet points than real privacy concerns.

It's the nature of the beast. Federated software holds no secrets.
Related: https://sopuli.xyz/post/31369487
- It might not be a secret but voting should be a private thing, like most irl voting. It is nowhere explicitly stated to the users, no apps or website says it.
  
  Even if sites like lemmyvotes disappear and software like kbin/mbin starts hiding the votes all you need to do is to spin up your own lemmy server. Piefeds dev is actively trying to find a way to obscure voting, but I think that ended with the choice of public (federated) vote or private (instance-only) voting.
  I agree that the public nature of votes could be made more apparent, but the lemmy devs has decided against that
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
  
  It literally can't be private, just from the way Lenny works. You can't have it all. You could in theory make it less visible, but that would be a false sense of privacy as it would be possible to do get the information with some effort. Just having it be fully open is more honest and makes no claims it can't keep.
  It's social media, even if federated. On Facebook, tiktok or whatever they are also not private btw: maybe users can or can't see them (I have no idea), but the company behind the platform certainly can and will use it for advertising to you and for what else to show you, making you the product.
  
  If you are logged in to anything, what you do is tied to your account. Welcome to the internet. Instance admin on your instance can figure out your ip. Nobody else. You can run your own instance to avoid this if you want. Or just use a vpn.
  Google track you constantly even when you are not logged in by the way, with scripts on almost every web page. So they have your real name, your entire search history, and what exact programs you use on your phone if you have android.

The IP address thing is not real, though
Just choose a nickname that is random word+4 random digits and don't reuse it on other services
- This is the way. Randomise your usernames and use a password manager to keep track of them.

Sir, this is the Fediverse.
- It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be
  
  It's the other way around here: Everything is public except where it's made clear that it won't be (e.g. email address, password).
  For what it's worth, your instance of choice is particularly negligent in regard to informing its users. Compare lemmy.today/legal to lemmy.world/legal, or their respective signup pages for examples. There's little that Lemmy itself or the community at large can do about that 😞
  
  An EU resident could sue for emotional damages under the GDPR. Or maybe just complain to data protection authorities.
  One day it will happen.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk.
Your IP would only be seen by your instance (which is inevitable, you gotta connect to it after all). But there's no way for anyone else to look up your IP.
- I read that since images are hosted on the instance they were posted to, any instance hosting pictures you load, even if they're DMd to you can get your ip. So someone could just DM you a picture from their own instance if they wanted it for whatever reason. I have not personally verified, but just adding it here because this comment seems to be the most succinct and accurate one I currently see.
  
  even if they're DMd to you
  Really only if they're DMs. Because a publicly posted picture yeah, they'll see your IP loading it but they will also see everyone's, with no way to tell who is who.
  And a fairly recently Lemmy was updated to not show embedded images in DMs so that wouldn't even work. (This depends on your client, but on the most recent official web version external images are blocked)

My votes are a massive privacy risk? How? I'm putting them out there publicly willingly. As is the nature of the internet.

this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing
- I did this last night putting my son to bed, said heads you go to bed, tails we stay up. Jokes on him though, double heads. And he fell for it, what a sucker. Hope it works when he's not four, or I at least don't need to do it.
  
  you're raising a future supervillain
- You get 3 accounts. Say you want to upvote something. You downvote in 1 account (randomly selected), upvote on another, and upvote on the third. So it’s net +1 and the only way to see how you voted is to piece together all 3 of your accounts voting history. Need more privacy? No problem, just use 5 accounts instead of 3.
  /s
  
  wait, so what do i do with the first shell again?

I want you to know
- that you are skibidi sigma rizzler from ohio ?
- ?
  
  They want you to know that they downvoted you

Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.
- It is not a cesspool if you stick to niche communities and avoid scrolling r/all
  
  I got kicked off of Reddit for saying "fuck Ukraine" when some little bundle of twigs said they liked a certain Van Gogh painting because "it matches the color of the Ukraine flag". That was in r/museum, where you'd think there wouldn't be much political horseshit.

If you're an instance admin, for any post, you can just click "view votes" and see everything tied to usernames, even outside your own instance. Moderators can too, but it's restricted to the communities they moderate.
- So if a bad actor wanted to get aces to vote data, they could setup and instance and have it federate with any instance they want to extract voting data from?
  
  Yes, it's very simple too. You don't even need to extract anything from a database or do some complicated stuff. As an admin you have free access to all moderation tools no matter where the post is from, including the option to "view votes".

Oh no now the lemmy.ml special mods will know I downvote them when I see them lol

A lot of people here still refuse to understand that Lemmy, as it currently exists, is a privacy nightmare, and the voting thing is just the top of the iceberg. There are several de-anonymization attacks possible involving dynamically serving different content to different users. This, combined with the public voting makes it possible that someone can dox an account and expose a lot more information than other forums where that information is more private.
Public votes also open the fediverse up to much worse astroturfing IMO. It's incredible feedback for bots and trolls to see exactly who is interacting with their posts and comments. It's frustrating that a bunch of people here have convinced themselves of the opposite, and insist that public voting is the only way to combat brigades and trolls, which is an incredibly shortsighted stance which doesn't scale nearly as well as it does in the other direction.
- iirc someone got banned from like 25 subs because they downvoted a single post that said "I want YOU to generate more AI slop" and the mod got pissed and power tripped super hard
- Could you give an example of what else is a problem?
- What do you mean by dox here? I usually think of dox as being, real name, real address, etc. But I'm having trouble seeing how even my Lemmy instance admin could figure that out about me.
  
  Nobody sets out to be doxxed, but it happens. And as it stands on the fediverse, when it happens the consequences are potentially even greater because all activity is available to all subscribers. All I am asking is for these simple facts to be acknowledged when we have this discussion. The potential risk profile for using Lemmy is greater than reddit in many ways. My frustration with how people approach this conversation is that they all too frequently dismiss or ignore this simple fact.
  It doesn't need to be like this though. There are simple ways to mitigate this, but people are weirdly hostile to them, and I believe it is specifically because they do not acknowledge this additional risk.
- Just don't say anything that you wouldn't say in public. I'm willing to defend anything I've ever said here.
  
  Again, it's shocking how on this singular issue, we find "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" acceptable.
  
  You mean to say: ::: spoiler "Wer nichts zu verbergen hat, hat auch nichts zu befürchten" "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." :::
  How quick we are to adopt the logical fallacy of Joseph Goebbels when we want to protect our creature comforts, rather than our privacy.

I dsiagree that transparent upvotes are an issue. In fact i think it's a powerful feature for community to self correct and resist astro turfing.
On reddit votes have become meaningless because they are not 1 person == 1 vote and its completely astroturfed. You can literally got to buyredditvotes dot com (not real but real ones are very close just google it) and stuff any post with votes and nobody will ever know.
Transparent interactions are key for community health even if behind anonymous nicknames. So all interactions should be transparent.
My only issue is that many lemmy instances are blocking popular VPN services which is very dangerous. I understand the bot argument but (even though residential proxies are dirt cheap these days) user safety suffers hard here.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
No.
- It would be unusual to be able to exactly identify someone purely from their IP, but let's say someone posted from their work IP in a small company. It would substantially lower the bar to dox them.
  Let's go further and ponder if an authoritarian regime setup an admin and started coorelating dissent ip's collected from user when they did things like paying parking fines, or signing their online tax forms.
  Let's say that they collected all that and trained an LLM on it, then when you go to get a passport renewed or are stopped for a traffic violation and ask the LLM if you're a dangerous person based on their criteria.
  It's not a direct problem, but it has slippery slope all over it.
  
  IP addresses are not something that can be pulled from just any instance. You would need to be the administrator, and even then you'd only get access to the ip address of just your own instance users. AFAIK, at least - maybe they've made efforts to mask ips, too, but im not even sure how that'd work.
  Federated posts and comments are copied from server to server. When someone from .world is looking at a comment from .dbzer0, what they are seeing is information that was synced from the dbzer0 server address, not the user's.
  There was a brief moment when there was a vulnerability with linked images sent via DM that could route you to an external server and log your IP address, but that has been patched now by most instances.
  As with anything on the internet: assume your activity is not private at all times, or take active precautions to mask your identity, or both. No opsec is perfect and often the only thing standing in the way of a hack or dox is the endurance and motivation of the bad actor.
  
  Let's just say you don't understand how IP or llms work.

I’ll downvote everyone here if I damn well please it!!!

Seems like a good thing to me. Should be a better known feature.
How would I go about seeing this information for myself?
- lemvotes.org
  
  Scroll all the way down: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
  
  This always givea me a 404
- Yeah, at worst it’s a necessary evil to prevent a rogue user on a second instance from mass downvoting. Your username is tied to your vote, because otherwise a rogue user could just spam downvotes at whatever they didn’t like.
  Instance 1 has a post. Instance 2 has a user who disagrees with that post. User is able to spam downvotes, because instance 2 is not binding their username to the vote. So Instance 1 has no way of knowing if the votes are multiple different users, or all one user. The only real solution here is to disable external voting, but the entire point of the fediverse is cross-compatibility and self-hosting. By binding the username to the vote, instance 1 is able to detect repeat votes and disregard them.
  
  Public votes do absolutely nothing to stop people from making a bunch of users on a bunch of instances and voting from those users. Voting agents are a simple solution to the issue, since you can still just ban the voting agent if it seems problematic.
  But there's a deeper context here, which is we are drawing a weird line between voting being a fundamental, if not critical part of the application, but also apparently grounds for imposing sanctions on users for doing it wrong? That's a fundamentally flawed mechanic no matter how you swing it, since you can't standardize any singular set of rules, and we are already seeing a rapid escalation of tit for tat vote bans. This is just unsustainable and is pushing things towards an obvious endpoint where there is such a chilling effect on voting that it negates the entire utility of the mechanic for sorting and content curation.
  
  Important to note here, too, is that ip addresses of users arent synced across instances.
  This is only a problem for people who care about the reputation of their user account - which is something people should be rotating out anyway if they care about their privacy.
- I am not saying if it is good or bad but it is terrible that it is not made clear.
- I posted in the wrong spot, sorry. There’s a link and screenshot here:
  https://lemmy.myserv.one/comment/15441289

It was something I had to learn, coming from Reddit.
But I made my peace with it. Let the mods* see my up/downvotes. If that becomes a problem then, well, the Lemmyverse isn't right for me.
I was told that anyone can see this, with a little effort.
But I have not heard about this applying to IPs.
Obviously someone running an instance (an admin, not a mod) can see who visits that instance; that's just how servers work, and it's valid for reddit as well. If you can't live with that you must use Tor or VPN.
So while I agree that everyone should be aware that up/downvotes + username are visible to anyone, I'm not sure about the IP argument.
- IP thing is a risk but I don’t see an alternative as you pointed out.
  
  Only your instance can see ips. They're a fundamental part of how the internet works, so there's no alternative to that.
  Other instance admins can't see your ip.

It's currently impossible to have private upvotes and downvotes with a federated service. It could probably be done, but it'd need a big revamp of the ActivityPub protocol, and apps would need to adopt the new protocol version. It's not trivial.
Just hiding the data in the UI doesn't solve it, because the data is still there.
Additionally, a lot of other social media sites have public votes/likes, as long as the content is public. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn, Telegram (if you consider it social media?), and probably some others all have public likes by default.
- It is okay to have public votes but it should be made clear to the users. Instagram and others allow you to see who has liked easily (next to the like button), so everyone knows it is public. Lemmy does not let me see who voted easily and it being a reddit alternative further makes it seem anonymous.
  
  Lemmy does have a way to view votes, but it's only visible to admins. It's weird because admins can view votes for anything, even posts and comments not on the server they admin. I'm not sure why they did it that way.

How do you do this and where can I find this info because I'd like to know.
I'll start by asking you if I upvoted or downvoted this post.
- https://lemvotes.org/
- https://lemvotes.org/post/lemmy.today/post/35342930
- Upvoted
- It’s fundamentally a part of how Activity-Pub works. To send any action (on any AP platform) the action must be associated with a username, especially when it’s going to another server/instance. On Lemmy the voting information has always been visible to admins and I think mods, but hidden from ordinary users. If you use a different, compatible platform, though, it might be easily visible. I think Kbin/Mbin shows them to everyone, Friendica shows all votes, and I think Mastodon shows at least the upvotes as favorites/❤️s. You can also go someplace like Lemvotes to see votes.
  For a while Piefed tried to get around this by sending up/down votes from alternate accounts on an instance that weren’t tied to any particular user, but I guess that caused its own problems so they stopped. Their option now is to simply prevent votes from federating to other instances, although that means vote totals may vary from one instance to another.
- You have to be an admin / mod?. EDIT: (or as @jeena@piefed.jeena.net has pointed out a federated service publishes it)
  
  The weird part of this experiment was that I intentionally didn't vote at all. I didn't upvote or downvote .... all I did was comment just to see what would happen.
- Others have pointed out some websites and admins can take it a step further by seeing entire history for any user. Admins have way too much information on Lemmy.
  
  Admins have way too much information on Lemmy.
  No, users have way too little information on Lemmy. This whole distinction between "the admins, who see secrets and control the flow of information" versus "the users, who are only allowed to know what we tell them, and have to follow our rules" is a holdover from corporate structures of web service. For the most part, it has no place in the future I would like to see.
  The technology makes it impossible to hide the votes. So don't hide the votes. It's okay, as long as people know that's what is going on. But anything that creates that kind of lord-and-peasant dichotomy should be minimized as much as possible within the realities of how things are going to get hosted. Admins can read DMs. So end-to-end encrypt the DMs. Mods and admins can make deletion and bans. So put the users in control of who's allowed to "moderate" their individual feed (this is one thing that as I understand it Bluesky actually did very right), don't partition everything into spaces where at all times the "users" are powerless to overrule someone trying to control their feed for them. And so on. You get the idea.
  That's my opinion, others might see it differently, but I really don't get why they copied all elements of the Reddit model when a lot of them have no place (or don't even make sense) in a federated network.
  
  Just wait until you find out how much info Reddit admins have on redditors

Cool stuff right? Everyone can spy on you, and you can keep them guessing by behaving incongruent. Lots of fun!
- Lol
  
  🥸

I remember learning about this and not giving a fuck. I vote stuff on occasion, but generally don't vote or care about the votes on my comment.
- "I don't care about privacy cuz I've got nothing to hide" ass comment

Personally, I couldn't care less.
- Are you harvesting vote data with this comment
  
  Are YOU?!??!

I was unaware that it was unclear to anyone but children and the intellectually behind that anything you do on the Internet is traceable to you without significant countermeasures.

It's a good thing to be concerned about privacy! While voting patterns/voting retaliation is certainly possible on Lemmy, I think following good general security practices can go a long way towards mitigating those things. (Anyone who's new to online privacy or needs a helping hand to get started should def check out the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense site.)

Make a new account every once and a while if it concerns you. This is probably the best way to deal with it but it aint perfect
- It is a solution but it is a solution to a problem which should not exist.

If you ever get banned for the way you vote then abandon that reddit space.
- If you live in certain fascist countries and government officials link your identity and account, suddenly they can confirm if you are undesirable
- What do you mean by Reddit space?
  
  Many subreddits ban you for interacting with subreddits they don't like for personal reasons.
  If the same thing happens here it's our duty as users to abandon that space

Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk.
Why?
- If I know the things you post/vote about and I know your general location (from IP), I can use that along with other metrics from other usage of your IP (on other websites) to get a fairly accurate location and profile of who you are. One slip up in a comment or a post and I can probably know your name and address.
  This is assuming someone is specifically targeting you. But as tech advances, it might already be possible for the average person to do this on a large number of people. Big tech does it already.
  
  If I know the things you post/vote
  Post or vote? As you appear to be specifically butthurt about people being able to see how you vote? Or perhaps you would like your posts to be anonymous as well?
  I know your general location (from IP)
  You don't.
  other usage of your IP (on other websites)
  You don't.
  fairly accurate location and profile of who you are
  You don't.
  One slip up in a comment or a post and I can probably know your name and address.
  Yeah, if I put in my name and address when commenting 🙄

An entire thread of people missing the point 🙄
- I have to assume it was the same case on Reddit, except it was only info available privately, to whomever. Now, every psychopath and their mother can find people who disagree quietly and hunt them down!

Where can I see the IP address Lemmy ties to me?
- Lemmy does make some attempts to hide your IP address, but everyone should know that any time you visit a website, that website gets your IP.
  So of course your instance has your IP (whoever's running it). And if you ever explicitly visit another domain, they'll get your IP as well.
- In the server logs if you're a admin.
- even as a lemmy admin of a server you don't to see that. you would need server / db access
- Admins have it. And by admin, I assume it is admins of all instances. And anyone can make an instance.
  
  user ip adresses are not federated, only the lemmy.today admin can find your ip
  
  IP addresses are not, and have never been federated. This may shock you, but any admin of any website can see what IP address you're connecting from if you connect to their site.

So would an oppressive government be able to simply set up their own instance and identify the IPs of lurker dissidents based on what they up/downvote?
- Only if said lurker registered on their specific instance. Only piefed.world can correlate your ip with your user and only sopuli.xyz can do it for mine.
  lemmy.world never gets our ip from what we post. They could see that an ip accessed a picture they host but not with a username attached. (same as every webserver can)
- No you have to run the instance.
  I do think it's hilarious that all these users think the majority of admins are going to do jail time protecting your data.

I try not to downvote without commenting so they should be aware
- Why? If an upvote does not need an explanation, neither does a downvote.
  
  Saying I disagree without explanation robs the OP and the community of varied conversation. To comment on an upvote would pretty much just be what the op posted. It also stops bandwagoning where people just downvote to get an inflated ego and feel they're right while contributing nothing but hiding a comment (comment dropping off due to filters).
- this is the way. I HATE when people downvote for no reason and don't even attempt to have a conversation about it
  edit: goddamn it you goofballs 😂
  
  I'll downvote something if it is irrelevant to the community at hand, or if someone creates a community specifically to bypass community blocks users have made. We don't need 10 communities about the same thing, and users should absolutely be penalized for making superfluous communities to evade community blocks.

Get bent you You spreader of blatant misinformation with a agenda for certain, go, jump up your own ass you weirdo
- Value of an opinion should not be judged by whom it comes from.
  
  Usually true but I make an exception for Russian trolls.

Here’s the link (scroll all the way down):
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
TBH, I haven’t really searched for any info regarding IP address.
I just assumed that everyone here on Lemmy lives behind layers of adblockers and has their VPN Kill Switch toggled ON.
- Assuming people use a vpn is a bit of a stretch. I dont know anyone that does that constantly.
- Thanks for the link.
  If an open source "better" alternative to Reddit requires users to be behind a VPN to get basic privacy, the developers or community has lost the plot.

Freedom is a luxury and anonymity is a crime. After all, how can any slave think to hide his intentions from his masters?

I'm not a jackass with downvotes, so I'm not worried.
- What do you mean?
  
  Since he doesn't have anything to hide, he doesn't have anything to fear
  
  I don't use downvotes unless someone is factually wrong in a big way, posts something homophobic / racist / etc, or acts rude without cause and the like. Some people downvote every comment they disagree with. I don't think that's how downvotes ought to be used. Nor do I brigade.

whats the problem with it . you did not liked it you downvoted . its not like they can ban your account
- Someone has been banned for downvoting a single post.
  I was targeted by someone for how I voted. They follow me around and harrass me.
  
  Unemployment on peak bruh and following on non centralised niche social media is diabolical

Kinda sounds like you just dislike accountability

I don't think worrying about upvote is necessary im just saying
- It is not about the vote. It is about knowing what is public and what is not.

It shouldn't be private. I want to know which members of the community lean one way or another through their voting record, it makes me understand them better and allows me to call them out on it. In fact, I wish it were openly displayed like in LSA. But AA women are a brave and 'real' group of people, at least comparatively, I guess. 🤷😅
OP, you're a coward!
- I am a coward for having a different opinion and then putting it on display after being called out about it?
  
  having a different opinion
  By "having different opinion" you mean justifying Putin's aggression? You have rightly been called out about it. I suggest you should stick to Lemmy.ml next time.

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