YSK: Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

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.

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 😞

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

No.

Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.

Kinda sounds like you just dislike accountability

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
- This always givea me a 404

this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing

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.

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%

An entire thread of people missing the point 🙄

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 admins of your instance.
- 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?

Don't tell anyone, but your posts and comments are also public.

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.
- 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.
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 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.

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.
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.

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)

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.

Team Periwinkle ftw.

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.

Personally, I couldn't care less.

Are you harvesting vote data with this comment
- Are YOU?!??!

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

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

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

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.
- 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.
- 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'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.

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.

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

Lol
- 🥸

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.

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.

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.

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
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.
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.
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

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.)

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.

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 🙄

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.