this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by o_o@programming.dev to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[–] UrbenLegend@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] o_o@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.

Which kbin.social does.

[–] CorrodedCranium@lemmy.fmhy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

Another potential privacy issue is that deleted content stays on server and I believe it's similar with posted images.

[–] o_o@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

I think this issue is overblown. Instances of Lemmy might run modified code and choose to save things that the user intended to delete, of course, but the default setup of Lemmy seems reasonable to me in terms of how it treats deletion.

Currently it keeps deleted posts forever to allow users to un-delete if they choose, but deleting your account clears everything. And I believe there’s work in progress to discard deleted posts after 30 days. Details here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2977