Against.

Not that I would use it anyway, but I bet it helps in finding bots that manipulate certain posts. R****t has ton of these and they end up undetected, especially with new private profile settings. I’d rather show everyone what I voted for and let them know I am real rather than have bunch of people in threads promoting corpo things as if they are real people.

Not sure how I feel about this. Anyone have a TL/DR on the situation or can point to a good discussion on this?

Against: you depend on the lemvotes instance implementing the opt-out feature, you can just as easily fork it and remove it

I’m in favor of opting out of this, but not because of privacy concerns. Being able to identify how users vote would take away from conversation, as well as discourage users who would rather avoid being dragged into the conversation from voting at all. Sure, the data is already available to those willing to spin up an instance, but the overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t bother. This really should be opt in instead of opt out.

I’m against opting out. Whether Lemvotes, vote federation, or the voting system as a whole are good or bad isn’t the matter at hand. This vote is either for or against plugging our collective noses and pretending everything eternally smells like lilacs.

in FAVOR: even if it’s a bit of a facade, it gives off the signal to future devs that privacy is still very much a desired thing, even here, and not an after thought.

Against.

• Does not stop voting being public
• Does nothing for privacy, it doesn’t stop how federation sends the info required to vote
• Useful for moderators in communities where they have haters despite being self contained.
• Useful for users to know when they have a dedicated hater/fan.

Against.

To block it would just further a false sense of privacy. The votes are already public, this just makes that data very slightly more accessible. To pretend otherwise is simply burying our heads in the sand.

Is the div0 bot broken right now?

I don’t think so, votes are public by nature, and it is useful to be able to find where and how users vote to make judgements based on vote manipulation. I say this as someone who has dealt with huge amounts of vote manipulation in my own communities.

Although the fact they are offering opt outs from instance admins instead of making it censorship/defederation hardened does make me lose faith in the integrity of lemvotes as a service since it no longer will show a majority of votes due to admins opting out.

Against.

Facade of privacy is worse. Opting out won’t do anything, and it might give people false sense of privacy. Let everyone know their votes are public. In my head, voting on lemmy is equivalent of saying “aye” in real life, that is, you are assenting to something publicly.

I in fact consider this to be a feature, it’s helpful in detecting votes manipulation.

Personally I vote against because security through obscurity, isn’t. People who want to get this data for malicious purposes can easily get it. It will only affect people trying to do it causally (i.e. To check if someone is a chud).

I personally find the whole voting system in lemmy flawed but that’s another story.

Against.

Hi, Lemvotes dev here. As you can imagine, I believe votes on the Fediverse should be public, because that’s just how ActivityPub works. Votes are sent out to every subscribed instance, which can then do whatever it wants with them.

We need to stop pretending votes on Lemmy are private, they’re not. By letting anyone view votes (well, they can do that without Lemvotes by setting up their own instance, Lemvotes just lowers the entry barrier), users can see, for example, who’s serially downvoting their posts or a community’s posts.

Also, I don’t think votes being public ruins Lemmy. They’re public on bluesky and (virtually) no one is complaining. Additionally, platforms like kbin and mbin, which are part of the Fediverse, already make votes public. So even without Lemvotes, people can view the votes on posts. Lemvotes just makes it a bit more convenient.

The only way to fully prevent anyone other than dbzer0 admins from viewing votes is to disable federation.

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.

Just a technical nitpick, this is inaccurate. Lemvotes queries the Lemmy database directly, so instance admins can plug it into the db and Lemvotes is running. I was considering making Lemvotes its own Fediverse actor, so that (1) setting up an instance of Lemvotes would be easier, and (2) opting out would be simpler by simply defederating lemvotes.org (or wherever the instance is running), but after working on it for a bit (the results of my work are on this git branch), I realized I don’t know enough about ActivityPub, and that I don’t care enough about Lemvotes or Lemmy to spend my time on this, as I have other projects to work on. In case anyone wants to develop that themselves, they’re free to do so! Lemvotes is open source.