Overall, I really like Lemmy, and the communities therein. There do seem to be some more radical takes on this platform than I’m used to. I haven’t heard of anyone being swatted or anything like that on here (or even actively doxxed), but there do seem to be more radical takes that what I’m used to on other platforms. I generally don’t engage with those groups. I’m just here for the memes, and to share my knowledge on topics I like. I don’t want to have to worry much about some bored, idealistic shitlord taking offense and going out of their way to nuke me.
As a new motorhead, how carefully do I need to tread, compared to other platforms? I ask, because it seems like posts on here are cast to a much broader network.
Everything you do here is public, including votes.
I was discussing this in another thread, this is a bit of an overstatement.
While logs may track what you view on some instances, the data on who views what is not public and not accessible to anyone except perhaps some instance admins depending on how they store logs.
Votes are public on Lemmy, and I think long term that’ll be beneficial for the platform and users.
With any online system, assume all interactions are tracked and will be made public in the near future.
It isn’t necessarily true now but it’s really hard for you to verify. Even if it’s true now, it could change without you knowing.
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How do you see what people voted on and how they voted?
It’s not displayed in the Lemmy UI but is in the database and can be displayed on other Fediverse UIs e.g. Kbin.
Only server admins can see votes I think so not really public.
That is what I thought also, but that other commenter stated that votes are public as if it’s a fact that is known so I wanted them to elaborate on that.
But anyone can run a server.
That doesn’t mean they get to see how all users from all other federated instances are voting on things…server admins only get to see how their own local users are voting, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone - those votes would obviously have to be stored in a local database somewhere and it’s a foregone conclusion that server admins would have access to any data stored on the servers they administer.
When someone says “votes are public” that kind of implies ‘publicly visible’…and they clearly are not. It’d be like making the claim that your private text messages you send to your friends and family ‘are public’ because the administrators working for your cell phone carrier could access them if they wanted/needed to.
It could be that what you’re saying is correct but this post suggests otherwise.
That’s very insightful. I still don’t think that qualifies as being ‘public’, but given a malicious instance operator they could be exposed if that post is accurate.
Yes it’s not ‘public’ in a broadcast sense but it’s in the ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ bracket.
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