I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It’s why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
Even DMs?
Yes.
I don’t know of any clients that publicly show it, but the information is sent out as a json that can be read by anyone setup to receive them.
ActivityPub is public by design and admins can easily read DMs. Not sure about it Joe public can read any dm.
Admins of most services where data aren’t encrypted can read data that is not public so I’d assume that by default.
Now my question specifically is about “Joe public”.
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Yes, the information is sent to your instance, and then is being censored by your instance. It’s personal choice for the instance and it’s support. But your instance must either be commonly supporting you not seeing it, or dictating you aren’t seeing it.
Kind of like the championship football game played in the U.S. today before the Superbowl, where Fox edited out access to seeing people paying tribute to the man murdered by ice.
Sometimes it’s good to have information, sometimes people think it is not
Wait what
I would like to see the ratio of up/down, because that’s IMO much more informative, if you allow votes at all. Personally I think votes just triggers some dopamine crap and is totally useless most of the times (exceptions are serious places where responsible people downvote wrong information for example)
That’s typically enabled/disabled in the settings of the client.
Fiddled around a bit and found a setting for that, or so it seems, gotta go collect some downvotes to try it out 😁
Thanks!
Aw, shoot. It doesn’t seem to work for PieFed. For example, here’s a link straight to the original instance and thread: https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1701717/
Changing that “p” to “post” didn’t seem to work, either.
Isn’t PieFed explicitly written to make votes anonymous again? Or am I thinking of something else?
Another commenter stated (its a little ways down the thread) they abandoned that plan due to complexity. (and other instance admins getting mad they couldnt see votes)
They ended up moving to a system where you now decide if you want your votes to federate outside the instance or not.
I’m also on fedia and I can see who upvoted and boosted a comment / thread / post.
Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.
I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don’t miss it. I think it took me about the week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.
If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I’ll report it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don’t know how it is with other software.
Fedia.io is also an mbin instance, you are speaking about the same thing.
Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.