Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous

Agreed from a technical standpoint.

But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.

Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.

I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?

In fact, Reddit has suspended people for upvoting before.

That's not really true, since on reddit only the one host can see the votes, as opposed to anyone who is willing to put the effort in.

@interdimensionalmeme @oo Agreed! Your voting history will help others gauge how objective (or not) you are.

It also discourages people from upvoting more controversial topics, for better or for worse.

I just hope it doesn't turn into Twitter's culture of ruining people's lives by showing they liked a sus tweet 5 years ago, LMAO.

True! Also instances could each do their own brand of “vote manipulation mitigation” by counting or ignoring different sources of votes.

Other cool features come to mind, like having a separate vote count for voters from the local instance.

That's interesting, tho I'd rather have that info seen by admins only, it could lead to brigading/harassment otherwise IMO.

How do you identify a bot account?

Good on you for actually checking and not blindly assuming like me! Hahaha glad to see my assumptions bore out this time.

But yeah, even if lemmy doesn’t aggregate it, it would be possible to set up a bot pretending to be an instance which collects and aggregates vote histories.

You can't aggregate them internally, anyway. You need to be able to know if someone already voted on something.

I think activitypub needs to be extended so that the likes and reduces only need to be sent to the host of the content, with federation then being told just the aggregate number. Then the only servers that need to know identity of votes are the host server (necessary to ensure nobody can multi vote) and optionally the server the user voted on (could just relay the information to the host server and not store it locally, but then it'd be harder to tell what you've already upvoted -- could use local storage but I think lots of people use social media on multiple devices).

Is that ID local to the instance or universal across the fediverse?

Can't the other instances see what you saw via federation? Or does a self hosted lemmy instance federate all comments from all threads once it knows about a server?

Not a stupid question at all!

Lemmy and Kbin are two different systems that talk to each other. Like how Gmail and Outlook are two different systems, but you can still send emails between them.

So you can make posts over there on Kbin and I can upvote them from over here on Lemmy.

Make sense?

Just from what I understand myself, it's that they are two different software setups. But they both use the ActivityPub standard that all federated content is using. KBin is different though in that it's trying to be more like Twitter with Sub Reddits, than like Reddit with Tweeting. And Lemmy is just purely trying to recreate the Reddit experience. So like on Twitter, Mastadon, and KBin upvote is more of a like and people can see what accounts "like." KBin and Mastadon share the same 'microblogging' feature which is like twitter. From what I understand they share microblogs across the fediverse.

And Lemmy and Kbin share communities/magazines together thanks to federation. So you're on a magazine in KBin but I'm on Lemmy on Lemmy World looking at this community from Lemmy.ml interacting with you.

Overall I think if you like Twitter and Reddit and are fine with your entire history of actions being public KBin is perfect. If you just want a Twitter experience, Mastadon. If you want some more obscurity with your account like Reddit and only the Reddit experience, Lemmy.

Right now I think KBin's feature parity isn't too far off from Mastadon and Lemmy. But like the rule of any thing that combines two tools, it can't be better than both separately. I think as Lemmy and Mastadon matures into their niches KBin will almost exclusively be playing catch up with both in the long term.

Most Lemmy instances and kbin are connected/federated to each other meaning that the content is available to both. For example, the thread you currently are replying to is on the Lemmy.ml instance. So in general you don't need to worry if the content is on a Lemmy instance or on kbin. You will see it anyway. So you can just pick the instance you like the UI best and use that.

There is a small caveat, in that a magazine/community will only start federating/being visible on a remote instance after someone visits that community for the first time. E.g if someone creates a new community on kbin, then it is only visible on kbin until someone goes to newcommunity@kbin.social on their instance. And also other way around. If someone makes a new community on Lemmy.world you won't see it on kbin until you it someone else goes to newcommunity@lemmy.world on kbin.

@MirrorIrorrIMG kbin and lemmy are two different clients (imagine Outlook or Apple Mail) for the same service (the threadiverse, or email in the prior example). Pick one, they federate with each other (cross-pollinate).

@oo

That's only on KBin though and it's a feature design of the KBin software. That's because it's based on Twitter where likes are public. Lemmy doesn't publicly show those actions. Idk how far it goes in terms Kbin tracking guests though.

I love it. I've already used that feature to block someone who was stalking my posts and downvoting them. Then I got curious and checked out a bunch of posts on the front page that had downvotes but didnt really warrant them. I found there were about 5 accounts who were heavy downvoters for apparently no reason. They also got blocked.

Kbin is influenced by wykop.pl that have a list of wbo downvotes or upvotes. Helps finding bots or mobs. Wykop was originally a Digg clone. It was huge in Poland for some time until it went full right wing populist and community got split into those who stayed and those who migrated to reddit.

Digg got a polish clone. Digg dies. Polish clone is huge. Some people move to Reddit. Polish clone eventually becomes a trash can. Wykop migrants are fed up by reddit, they move to kbin that is a Polish reddit clone but better.

What a circle.

Where can you see your vote history? I use Firefox and Jerboa to browse.

If I remember correctly, another reason was so that bots wouldn’t get usable feedback from voting.

It's sometimes hard to separate those feelings

Maybe a 3 button setup

• Agreed and acceptable content
• Disagree and acceptable content
• Bad content

Default Rankings are based on minimum bad-content/maximum agreed count
And controversial ranking is based on minimum bad-content/maximum good-content count (agree+disagree)

This way even comments that people disagree with can be exposed so long as it's still good content

Brigadiers who blindly vote everything bad content to maliciously influence rankings can be identified and removed for manipulation, while people who vehemently disgree with an idea can still have that outlet without influencing the community/magazine haphazardly

Fuck you, I disagree.

Is that better?

In term of privacy this is pretty bad though. From the upvotes/downvotes activity you can very easily build a whole graph of stuff you like/dislike. For advertisers that's juicy data.