this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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askchapo
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There isn't really a way to do this. Because they need to be synced between servers, those servers have to know where the votes are coming from to decide what to show/count properly/provide at least rudimentary defense from spam.
Consider hexbear feds with dbzero, zero feds with world, hex doesn't fed with world.
If a post lives on dbzero how should hexbear know what votes to display to its users? How should that a particular user already voted be remembered between page visits?
you could try some sort of cryptographic proof of trust but you're basically reinventing block chain and making running lemmy an environmental disaster.
yeah an alternative proposal is they're only public to the local instance admin and it groups its votes, sends them to the instance hosting the content, which adds them as totals annotated with the server.
But they're still not private. Instance admins can see them, and you can still see which instances are voting on what content which doesn't really improve much. Especially for small instances (e.g. if I have 10 people on an instance and only one user was active in a date range all votes are theirs).
Given how there are already problematic incentives to large instances I'm not sure we want to add to administrator (and everyone they care to share with) power based on size. Or deincentise users from signing up to small instances.
They shouldn't be private. Have you seen the way that lemmy.world uses botting to force this site and others to defederate after drowning them out?
Just how far are you people going to take the cargo cult of Reddiquette?
Why are you even imitating mainstream social media rules from the 3rd most racist site in the universe? What broke people here?
I am discussing possible implementations with someone, pointing out that necessarily votes are public to at least someone. Not endorsing it.
If you read my closing paragraph you will see I come down against private votes.
I don't know if it's intended but you're coming across very aggressive and I don't feel there is cause, even if I disagreed with you.
I'm used to pinging everyone above me, consider it a general addition to the chat in the entire thread. Seeing people actually hashing out completely anonymous voting, making this flimsy platform even more vulnerable to manipualtion by petty psychos like myself, makes me even more pessimistic about people's ability to learn from experiences with open source social media projects that imitate features which only work for corpos
The weird thing about this whole debate is it's already public, just only to an elite of people with basic technical skill and some cash to burn + all their friends.
I'm half tempted to spin up a server and just post the votes of everyone who federates to prove the stupid point.
First of all, because the Lemmy dev sucks at coding, and you guys are on ActivityPub, I can see all likes publicly anyways. What you're doing is like pretending Mastodon private posts are actually private. It's just an inconvenience.
You're the only one making vibes based claims about why Elon was right to hide likes.
This is typical ActivityPub jibber jabber. You had one bad experience with another user abusing a feature, so nobody else gets to have it. Guess what? People use blocking maliciously. I'm using the reply feature right now maliciously.
I'm stating the obvious about how much easier platform manipulation is for instance admins - who have a conflict of interest about this - and itinerant technoskulkers like me to be the only ones who can tell when something is fishy with the likes.
The "stop bullying" argument for destroying ActivityPub is always so fucking funny to me. You people removed quote tweets. I can't quote myself on basic Mastodon or search my own posts because people like you get taken seriously. But fortunately basic Mastodon sucks for many other reasons. It's no skin off my back. Just validates my instincts about these projects when people try to pass off their personal issues as a reason to make platforms worse.
When each user joins, a random voting user is created. When a user votes, their vote request is denied and a random voting user from the pool upbears the post. This way, nobody can see who votes for whom and it is cross compatible with all other instances, even ones that publish votes. The only issue is it creates a very large amount of junk users. This has already been implemented, sans the random pool on piefed.
How does the server remember that the user has voted? Say I upvote this, random_user:1337_h4ck3r does the vote. For my UI to show me I've voted a record must be stored about my votes.
Good question, I'd need to dig around a bit to agree that.