Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous
Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.
Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?
From a technical standpoint, it's not different from Reddit. The only difference here is that normal people can host their own instances, whereas Reddit is only hosted by the company and they can keep it under wraps.
I haven't looked for APIs to extract this data, it might only be available to an instance admin... but yeah Lemmy does not seem to aggregate vote histories, but rather stores them on a per-user basis.
Im sorry for the stupid question but can someone explain the difference between lemmy and Kbin?
I just recently created a kbin account and downloaded the kbin app but see a lot about lemmy on here. Is kbin a subset of lemmy? If I want a wider variety of content would I go to lemmy or kbin?
On the other hand, I don't really trust Reddit with my upvotes/downvotes all that much more than random users, so I already refrain from voting on content I wouldn't want to be associated with....
Of course, Reddit can still see what posts I view, while that isn't the case for Lemmy (at least since I self-host an instance).
It's also technically not on Reddit either. Letting people see what you up/downvoted is a setting that you can toggle as desired, although I believe that it defaults to "off".
Because in order to federate, user data needs to be shared, including the username. It prevents double votes from the same account and also allows votes to be rescinded at the user's discretion, at which point the instance will send effectively an undo signal for the activity.
The first rule of the Fediverse is to make sure you're perfectly okay with the entire internet seeing your account activity, including votes and favourites. If you're unsure or are worried you might regret it, best not to post it at all. This is equally true on all social media but the way the Fediverse works just makes it more obvious.
I didn’t know, that’s awesome! Downvote shouldn’t be the “fuck you I disagree” button, save that garbage for Twitter and Reddit. Downvote is there for democratically killing malevolent bullshit. Expose the names!
Wasn't part of the reason for anonymous voting and even "blurred" voting so accounts that were shadowbanned wouldn't know it and go create a new bot account to spam more?