Sorry to say, archive.org is under a ddos attack. The data is not affected, but most services are unavailable.
We are working on it & will post updates in comments.
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I know right? It sucks having a curved screen with a case as it pushes my thumb in the exact worst spot on the side of the screen. I accidentally do things all the time. I rest my thumb on the case edge to try and avoid it, but if I barely tilt, it touches the oversensitive touchscreen. First world problems.
Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won't tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you're interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.
Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.
Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.
Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren't truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)
I'll admit I'm no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it's good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)
And to underline part of my comment, I did say "I wonder if..." rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work
Fedi technologies are already distributed. That's literally what federation is about.
Blockchain isn't private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.
Any privacy features you're imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a "normal", web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.
It's almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.
Fair point. Blockchain might be the quickest to implement just because the infrastructure is already established, even if it's not trivial. Not sure, though.
I was wondering about this. If they didn't keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.