this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

This isn't just a Frendica thing; you can see this from Mastodon, mbin/kbin, etc. Many people seem to think upvotes and downvotes are private, but the reality is that they're publicly available information by default in ActivityPub. Lemmy just hides the information on the front-end for "normal" users; If you're a moderator you can clearly see everything.

If one wants truly pseudonymous voting, they're free to try out PieFed. See the announcement post for this feature for more details.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

The whole concept of the Fediverse as social media is that all the data is public. Stop acting like these servers are giving out private data. This data has never been private, and it never will be. Data like this being shared with any other server is how ActivityPub and the Fediverse work.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I know, but some people assume votes are private.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not good practice. Really one shouldn't be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That's why Lemmy has local-only communities, the "private" community aspect that many people want just won't be federated, because you can't make something like this private otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I know, but most people don't.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

I know, it's a really big problem here and on the Fediverse in general because people get so outraged and entitled over something that just is the way things are, this wouldn't work any other way.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (8 children)

If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I mod a small community with like 6 monthly users, I'm the only one who post or comment and the average post have 3/4 upvotes and 1 downvote. And I always ask myself who is downvoting my submissions, because it's make no sense to me that someone take the job of pressing the downvote button on a link to a EDM set. Couldn't they just block the community?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/home/all/scaled to show downvotes

Assess whether banning makes sense for someone who only downvotes content

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I've gone to my community and to specific posts, but can't work out how to show downvotes. Can you shed a little light on how to see them please?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How exactly can I see who downvoted? Can't seem to find it in the regular view, and the debug info only shows the vote count, not the voter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'd also like to know as I'm in the same boat you are. I'm just leaving this comment to remember to look later and see if you got an answer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's not about blocking, it's about sending a message.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No, sometimes it is about blocking.

If you run a small community like several of us do, even a small amount of downvotes can completely shut down a discussion from ever being seen by anyone else. It's a way petty assholes have of trying to kill conversation in small communities because they don't like something about what you said or how you said it.

If someone neither wants to contribute nor lurk, and merely drag down a community, they shouldn't be allowed to continue to be a part of it at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I understand that if you are exploring on all and so, sometimes some communities you couldn't care less appear on the feed, it's happens all the time to me with sports news and related, but I just block them and move on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

Yeah, that's what I do as well. Seems much nicer than hurting their community by just randomly downvoting everything I don't want to see.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Petty mods or users would abuse this

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

It's already possible to see if you really want to look. Friendica is just another way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mods can already see voting data, at least through the API on the latest version of Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Yes, after all other servers need this information in order to prevent double voting, you can't just have servers sending each other information "somebody upvoted this" and also tell when servers are allowing users to vote more than once.

So upvotes and downvotes aren't actually private, never have been, some servers may display them publicly even if most don't.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The server hosting the post needs it.

It only needs to tell other servers the vote count, and the votes of people on that other server.
That may not be how it actually works, but that's all that's needed

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Yes, but then you can have malicious servers sending fake numbers without other server operators being able to check whether this is at all plausible.

(It's still possible for malicious servers to send fake votes, but server operators can see which users they are stated to originate from, then block that server if that looks like it's doing that. At least that is my understanding.)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can't be identified across posts

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 3 days ago (11 children)

There's no way that isn't going to be abused. Some marketing or tracking agency will setup a fediverse server and just collect all data like this for free. Or worse, take advantage of a friendica instance to bombard it with requests for data collection purposes.

[–] [email protected] 84 points 3 days ago (14 children)

Well yes, the whole concept of the fediverse is that of social media as a public service. All activitypub data is public.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (8 children)

Yes, but as long as you don’t reveal your identity, they can’t do much to track you.

They don’t have access to your IP.

Of course, it you’re using the same username over multiple services, or reveal identifying information (which is much easier to analyse now due to AI) they will be able to track you.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

This is nothing new. Fire up any ActivityPub server and you can see everything over the wire. As a Lemmy admin of my server of just me, I can also see it in the UI.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Or you can be an instance admin. Iirc In the next lemmy version (1.0.0), mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 days ago (2 children)

mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.

You can already do this using tesseract, by the way (not tesseract.dubvee.org, strangely?)

On t.lemmy.dbzer0.com i can see both upvotes and downvotes (for all my modded comms):

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Any instance admin can see the vote history.

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