Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
Who cares? If your upvote or downvote or any other activity you deliberately perform on a public platform is something you’re embarrassed about and wouldn’t be willing to do in a face to face engagement you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
I agree, and if you absolutely must, then maybe make an alt?
The main problem is most people assume their votes are private, as they are private on reddit.
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.
I know, but some people assume votes are private.
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.
I know, but most people don’t.
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.
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!
Lemmy likes aren’t meant to be public, this is just other software failing to respect the privacy Lemmy indicates.
Oh. If the only thing stopping the votes being public is a label saying pretty please don’t make this public then it does seem very open to abuse.
Especially in federated networks where the data isn’t under access control, doubly so if the privacy extension is optional
That’s almost as bad as using robots.txt to claim sites are private and secure and just whining that people/bots should respect it.
You should assume voter data is fully public and fully open. It otherwise is in the federated ecosystem.
The comparison doesn’t work because both Lemmy and Mbin are implementing the same standard, while robots.txt is mostly an honour system.
You should assume voter data is fully public and fully open. It otherwise is in the federated ecosystem.
Information not being private isn’t the same thing as information being public.
Except ActivityPub data is by in large already not private, it is handed out to any tom dick and harry who run a server and have subscribed to actors on this one, and most of the time, it doesn’t even really require extra authorization. That is fundamentally how ActivityPub and federation work, but you can’t have any expectation of privacy in this system when it comes to the content shared. Expecting it to be private because it’s labeled is as dumb as expecting your website not to get scraped because you said so in robots.txt.
I didn’t say it was private, I said it wasn’t public, there’s a difference. If you asked me what number I was thinking of I’d tell you, but that’s not the same thing as the number I’m thinking of being public information. ActivityPub is, at its core, about consent. We have consented to having our data be sent to any person able to serve 200 responses on an inbox endpoint by using instances with open federation. We could, if that makes us uncomfortable, moved to a closed federation system where we only accept request from an allowlisted set of instances, with software that follows the spec’s public addressing system.
Information not being private isn’t the same thing as information being public.
I’m not sure that is a realistic expectation these days.
I don’t think everybody knows that and at least here on Lemmy, it doesn’t show it by default like friendica. The fediverse doesn’t necessarily mean that all data has to be public. It’s just that it’s way harder to have a sense of truth without public data.
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.
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.
Well yes, the whole concept of the fediverse is that of social media as a public service. All activitypub data is public.
So you’re agreeing with me that it will be abused.
Not them but yes but it’s not a feature of the system, it’s a failure of the humans.
What is it that you mean by that? Do you mind rephrasing your reply?
Tools do not have morality or ethics, only people do. Some people use tools in a morally and/or ethically questionable manner, either for profit or because it amuses them.
True, we perpetuate the unjust systems around us. Systems can be constructed to unfairly benefit some over others as well, like how capitalism unfairly benefits the wealthy.
i think we should be accounting for it if we don’t wanna get swallowed by shitty interests tbh
Like, of course; tho any sort of “accounting” should IMO start from the base that the intent of this entire thing is to publicly share public information.
has anyone come up with possible solutions yet?
But it has absolutely nothing to do with how it is displayed in Friendica.
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.
Is IP not logged anywhere in Lemmy/ ActivityPub?
Nope just server
If image embeds aren’t cached by your server they can be abused to gain IP, but that’s a hack, it’s not intended.
You can set a Lemmy server to proxy image requests
Exactly, that’s why I said for ones that aren’t cached. They can be cached, but it’s not a guarantee they will be.
Proxying is a separate option from caching. I think it was added in 0.19.5
I think server admins can access. It makes sense moderation wise, if for keeping a tab on alts for enforcing permabans.
This feature has been available to all kbin/Mbin users since the beginning, btw.
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.
What can they use that data for?
It would only be usable data if they could show personalized ads to the users. They can’t.
All they know is that Meldrik up/downvoted this and that, but outside of Lemmy they have no idea who Meldrik is.
If you think metadata is worthless, I would like to make you aware about Snowden and his revelations. Look them up.
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn’t. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don’t want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you’re revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you’d have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
Cant you just defed with them?
If you can identify all of their instances, yes.
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.
Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can’t be identified across posts
There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.
True, but there are other benefits too. Bots can’t crawl through your likes for example. Maybe you want a feature on lemmy or mastodon or whatever with anonymous polling? (ik masto has polls but for sake of argument) Maybe you’re implementing anonymous polling into an app for a trade union that needs total anonymity even from admins? It’s not totally unusual!
IMO it makes sense to do this at a platform level just because there’s a unified implementation of obfuscation across all the fediverse for any platforms that want to use, rather than a bunch of unique solutions that would be duplicated effort.
I mean, seems pretty pseudoanonymous to me, unless Musk had another kid he named apj2k36 or something.
People have really weird usernames sometimes
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.
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):
I guess the feature was already merged in one of the past Lemmy versions then?
I think it’s been implemented this whole time, but it’s just that the default lemmy-ui doesn’t show it
You can already do it with a database query iirc.
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?
Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/home/all/scaled to show downvotes
Assess whether banning makes sense for someone who only downvotes content
Some people just downvote for the sake of it.
I’m not sure about the downvotes part (i failed to recreate this lmao) but you can already view upvotes with mbin. Piefed solves this problem with a option to make your votes private but only with untrusted instances (but from my tests it didn’t work? weird)
IIRC, piefed’s private votes are disabled for “trusted” instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.
Ah, well that sucks :( i thought it just used a different strategy to do so if it was trusted, not outright disable it.
Will correct it, thanks
IIRC PieFed’s method is to send the upvote using a second random username not connected to your username.
Damn, so this is how I find out we’re least trustworthy part of the commonwealth.
That is stupid and defeats the point and makes me rethink my decision to support piefed.
Bummer.
It depends what your threat model is. Admins being dickheads about who downvoted what was the main issue at the time so I made it about choosing which admins to trust.
If future Lemmy versions show votes to mods (not just admins) then Pandora’s box would be well and truly open so we’d need to rethink this.
Yeah I guess for me I don’t really trust any admins. At the end of the day that’s a permanent database of user activity which could be passed along to anyone, so ideally the minimum threat surface would be that it exists only on the home instance.
Also, I kind of just don’t get the point of obfuscating for some and not others unless there are some politics going on behind the scenes, which just gives me even more cause for concern. I think this is a killer feature for piefed and really addresses a major concern I have with Lemmy so it is just disheartening to hear that the functionality has been nerfed for seemingly no good reason.
I hear ya. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth about it and we ended up with a compromise. It would be good to have more configurability of this to suit different preferences.
There’s a niche out there for a max-privacy instance. No server logs, no email verification, automatic deletion of old content. And if it was running PieFed, no trusted instances set.
Not a niche I want to pursue but someone could.
Do you have a link to any discussions on this? I have browsed local posts on piefed.social but can’t find it. I’d be curious to see more context in support of the trusted instance concept.
Check this out for general background discussion https://piefed.social/post/205362. The idea to differentiate by trusted instances was mine and not discussed there. Pretty sure there was some discussion about it in the Matrix channel which is lost to time.
During the recent roadmap planning one of the potential units of work was to sort all this out https://piefed.social/post/411591 but it didn’t garner significant interest and didn’t make it through to the final version of the roadmap.
this is an icky issue because lemmy sends votes with empty addressing, so remote instances should count them but not show them to anyone. however mastodon (and *key) sends likes with empty addressing too, but considers them public. lemmy is (surprisingly) right here and should request that the rest of fedi respects the protocol and hides stuff based on its addressing. maybe open issues on mastodon and friendica
also this issue probably exists when seeing lemmy posts on any microblogging instance
I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance
Any instance admin can see the vote history.
Removed by mod
There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!
Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.
kbin also got rid of the ability to view downvotes. I believe either before the fork or at least before the implosion while mbin were still mostly just pulling from upstream.
I was thinking that it would make sense to federate upvotes, but with the hash of your username instead of your actual handle. Would this work?
The userbase is small enough that hashing would be easy cracked by a determined person. Even with salting, iterating through the entire userbase and hashing each username+salt to check for a match would probably not take long
Replace “hashing” with “encrypted” (perhaps just using a symmetric key that the admin sets up) and then it gets impossible to know for any outsiders who is the real user behind the vote.
I for one just wish people understood once and for all that anything you do on social media is public.
If you are not comfortable backing up your opinion or action, then don’t do it.
Assuming each user will always encrypt to the same value, this still loses to statistical attacks.
As a simple example, users are e.g. more likely to vote on threads they comment in. With data reaching back far enough, people who exhibit “normal” behavior will be identified with high certainty.
What if a uuid is generated every time a user signs up, and every upvote iterates through the uuids?
One of the advantages of votes being public is that it keeps instance owners honest and, perhaps more importantly, means they know other instance owners are honest.
If they weren’t public it would be easy to modify your lemmy instance to send 10 votes with fake hashes for every real vote. There would be constant accusations of brigading and faking votes.
I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t already become rampant.
How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?
Nothing stops defederation, though.
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
But they can just be banned from those instances?
How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?
Banning trolls would be doable - they’d have patterns where they target specific users across many different communities. If the same user downvotes everything I’ve ever said, from controversial political takes to pictures of food to posts about gardening, that’s probably a malicious user.
But “brigading” doesn’t mean anything and I don’t respect the concept. You can’t ban it because you can’t define it in a way that doesn’t include normal usage of the site.
If the same user downvotes everything I’ve ever said,
Right. How would you know what “the same user” is? Let’s say that your posts get downvoted at random intervals by 5-10 users in the first 45-120 minutes. They all have different user names. What are you going to do? Create a report against any particular user and hope that the mods look into it?
Or mentally unwell people stalking.
Piefed already does this, because it is the way.
Just make a rainbow table and get the usernames back.
I was thinking just now how there seems to be people who downvotes threads for no apparent reason, even seemingly innocuous and neutral ones… for example “Kingdom Come has sold 2 million units” 3 downvotes; “This New Algorithm for Sorting Books Is Close to Perfection” 5 downvotes; you get the idea. Now everyone is entitled to their opinion, but It makes me wonder if someone(s) is spam downvoting for some motive.
Might just be people who are used to having an algorithm so they dislike stuff they don’t want to see more of.
Which is a problem
Every thread will get downvoted by someone for some reason. You would go insane trying to make sense of it.
That’s true, but since witnessing the waves of spam that flooded Kbin before its disappearance, I try to keep an eye open for this kind of shit.
The first isn’t really interesting, and the second is clickbait. I wouldn’t say there is no reason for downvoting them.
You are NOT supposed to downvote things that “aren’t really interesting”, you are actively ruining other people’s user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.
Some people might think it’s not interesting because it’s not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don’t think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
This is one of the reasons why I’d love to see a more expanded method of reacting to content rather than simply upvoting or dowvoting; something like, say, user-side thread or post tagging, with things like “verified”, “clickbait”, and mood reacts like “happy” vs “sad”, and usefulness reacts like “solved, thanks” vs “closed as duplicate”, etc. We need more and better axes.
(Axises? Axeses?
Asses?)Interesting idea, but how do you decide on what the universally-agreed on reactions are? Have too many and they may as well just be comments!
A fair point that I admittedly don’t know how to solve. The closest I’ve got to a “functional” idea is to focus on splitting the two (I think? maybe three) things that an “upvote” is interpreted as, and supplementing with also the opposite / counter message:
- “I like what this post is about” (basically a like / heart / kudos)
- “I found this information useful / verified / checked” (a more proper upvote)
- (optionally) “I want this information to be more easily found”
Pretty much everything else can be a comment, as you say, but the purpose and reception of a message should also be as streamlined to communicate as possible.
Some people only browse global feeds and downvote stuff as if they’re trying to train the Netflix recommendation algorithm, completely ignoring the rules of the community it originates from
I remember that being a problem back on Reddit (though I always found people upvoting low-effort stuff that wasn’t community/sub-appropriate to be more of a problem). It’s kind of a site-wide UX issue though really, if a new casual user is just presented with a list of posts then they might genuinely be unaware of (or perhaps just uninterested in) where they came from and what their votes mean.
Well yes, the visibility thing would be the point. Interesting and relevant content is upvoted, becoming more visible to more people, and uninteresting and irrelevant content is downvoted, becoming less visible and shown to fewer people.
Your interests are not identical with interests of other people.
My guess is accidentally hitting the button while scrolling, and too lazy to change it.
I wish I could see what scummy lemm.ee mods removed my comments and got me banned
you can, names are shown in other frontends like phtn.app.
Thanks but doesn’t work if you’re site-banned.
You can usually use another instance that shows names if you have an account there, it’ll show at least the federated stuff.
