OmniGlitcher

Your votes on Reddit are public to Reddit admins. On Lemmy anyone can be an admin.

Which is my concern. I don’t like Reddit having and selling that data, but it’s easier for me to trust-ish a singular entity than some entire web of random people, which probably includes some corporate people siphoning data anyway. I know some would likely find that a tad paradoxical, but that’s how my brain works. At least then the corporation can be held accountable per the standards of the region they’re based in should there be issues, or users can mass target the corporation rather than go “Don’t like it, just move to another instance.”.

For reference, it’s still not ideal, but I’d somewhat trust my instance’s admin. Why can’t my vote history be shared purely with them? Then give other admins the raw upvote/downvote data of the post/comment. After all, the instance I choose my account to be on is my decision.

Your Lemmy name shouldn’t be tied to your real name.

It’s not. I am careful about what I put online. Whilst I’m uncertain as I’ve never particularly tried to do so beyond some cursory Googling, I’m pretty sure you can’t tie my username back to me IRL. But even so, there’s no need to add to the pile of potentially traceable publically available data.

The purpose behind having votes be more public is to have some kind of reputation behind those votes.

That can still be anonymised behind a hashed ID. If all my votes were registed to some User-XXXX and it wasn’t possible to retrieve my username from that, I’d have no issues. Though from my discussion with other people, it seems that’s counter to how ActivityPub intrinsically works. I’m increasingly working towards the opinion that the fediverse isn’t for me, if it’s all set up in a similar fashion and apparently unchangeable. As they say, “different strokes for different folks” I guess.

But don’t do it as a protest. Do it because you don’t want to share that data publicly.

I mean yeah, that’s what I’d do it for. It’s a suggestion for the site and it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared by several people here, but it ultimately falls down to me to decide whether or not I want to continue using it, much the same as with my usage of Reddit.

If you’re worried about people collecting that data, then you shouldn’t have put it in public.

Voting is a core functionality of the site. It’s something I don’t think should be public as it puts more emphasis on what content I interact with in what is now apparently a public manner. If you want to debate that a mere vote is something I shouldn’t put in public, then fine, you do you. But for me, it defeats half the point of me even having an account here. What one comments on are often an incredibly small portion of what one actually votes on simply by ease of voting.

And I know I said “But Reddit…!” is a bad argument earlier, but even so, I’d like to say that even Reddit’s voting is not publicly accessible (as in not accessible by other users, even if Reddit almost certainly collects and sells such data), so clearly there should be ways to do it. If ActivityPub requires public voting and the people who have the ability to change it are unwilling or even unable to do so, then fair enough. But equally, I will refrain from contributing to such a site, which seems like a bit of a shame when it seems close to ideal otherwise.

You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

To some degree yes. However, I am simply a user. I have no idea where to even begin with attempting such a thing, and whilst I’m sure I could probably find out, even if I did it would take far longer to learn, nevermind getting it adopted. It’s a lot easier for the people running the site and who have knowledge of how to do so. It’s like going to a restaurant, not liking the way they’ve done the food, so the restaurant comes back with “Cook it yourself then”. The other “solution” is of course going to a different restaurant or simply not going to a restaurant. which if:

your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub

is truly the case, then it would seem that that is the only viable option for me personally.

And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote

I don’t care how people vote me. This isn’t strictly about downvotes, it’s about specifc content engagement.

And I really can’t imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

It’s potentially useful to someone. And I’d just rather not have that data public anyway, it’s just that simple. Enough data is already public, what types of content you actively engage with and how you engage with it also being public is just a bad idea in my opinion. These are core analytics almost any site collects, which imply they must have a purpose. Except here it’s public, and can also be swooped up by big companies should they dedicate a tiny fraction of computing power to run an instance.

I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don’t even know how we would make people aware of this.

Making these things directly accessible to end users would be a start. Have a stats button that shows who precisely voted what. Hiding this shit in the backend is just blatant obfuscation.

You’d have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time.

Then they should do so, these issues need to be fixed ASAP.

Still you’d need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof.

Obfuscating user IDs via a hash or something would seem like the way to make it work. I’m not a professional programmer, I only know a little bit of python, so I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense on that front. And whilst still not an ideal solution, but sharing non-private votes with your own instance admin and have them share only the total vote count with other instances is another solution. That way you need only trust your instance admin, which is choosable and can also be yourself.

That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.

Putting the onus on me is a shitty thing to do. I’m not the one running this site in any capacity, but this is an issue that many users are unhappy with. If the issue with the site won’t or even can’t be fixed, then I will simply not use the site. I don’t know how many people feel the same on that front, but I’d imagine there’s quite a few.

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

Ah yes, because the practical option is to be constantly switching accounts and instances based on what you want to look at for 5 minutes each.

My logic behind joining lemmy.world was that defederation may be an issue, current or future, therefore it made sense to join the one that for one has the most people, and for two is the least likely to be defederated or randomly defederate others.

Granted, I believe beehaw did in fact defederate .world, and I think it was not long after, so maybe I did choose poorly.

I was tempted to join feddit.uk, but I wasn’t sure if that would put the unnecessary identifier of “This guy’s probably British!” on me everywhere I go.

“How about 10 tomorrow?” typically refers to the time, probably 10am in this case. However it can also be interpreted as “How about 10 coffees tomorrow?”.

It’s not. This community so far has a single mod, @vatlark.

To quote him from here:

I created this community because it was my favorite on Reddit and I couldn’t find one on Lemmy.

He is apparently holding a vote for new mods.

My Reddit Cakeday used to be nothing special. It’s June 30th. There’s a certain irony behind all this somewhere.

I wish. It sent me to this post certainly, but the other time this happened it sent me to some Furry Memes post.

so we can focus on serious things like Donald Trump and superhero movies.

Yeah it’s fake. It felt serious until then.

Not that guy, but last year they got acquired by Branch, an analytics company. Android Police article about it here. The same company also acquired Sesame of Sesame Universal Search.

To clarify, I’m unaware if they’ve done anything suspicious since the acquistion, but potentially giving an analytics company launcher level access raised eyebrows for more than a few people, myself included.

Last year they got acquired by Branch, an analytics company. Android Police article about it here.

I heard mention of it occasionally, but that was also years after the initial move from Digg, so I can’t comment on what it was like first hand during the initial move time.

However, I don’t think anyone viewed Reddit as a “spite site” for Digg, Reddit was around for years and was semi-popular before Digg committed suicide. It was simply the natural move.

Lemmy on the other hand has been around for a little bit, since 2019 as far as I can tell, but a rather minimal userbase.

Certainly if we get to the point where Lemmy (and its current userbase at minimum) sticks around for a few more years, it’ll likely largely move past the whole Reddit fiasco. But it also needs a large variety of non-reddit-related content to interest users, otherwise this site will likely die before it gets there.

Yeah, I’m so angry about it I’m ready to implode.

Possibly an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Lemmy should be viewed as “spite sites”. If the entire focus of the community here is to point and laugh at Reddit’s failures, rather than actually provide an adequate site’s worth of unique content, people will quickly get tired of it and leave.

Of course, it’s the hot topic at the moment so it’s understandable, but I hope we’ll move away from it at some point.