Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
- You don’t need to be federated to read people’s activities…
- Even if there was some type of “authorized fetch” involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?
Ok, yeah, theoretically.
But we’re talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.
It’s not quite that simple. As far as I’m aware, it’s difficult to fetch from another instance “after the fact” what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance’s DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it’s supported).
But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one’s defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.
How is the data public? I’m asking in the most technical sense?
This informs an issue I’ve had lately with a group of three people or bots following along my comment chain (All my comments, for a while, were dropping consistently to -2 score in all contexts).
It’s my understanding that votes are not public. Am I wrong?
All votes are public, they’re literally broadcast to the Fediverse writ large. You vote on something on your server, your server then tells the server owning the thing you voted on and that server then tells anyone who is interested (subscribers on other servers). That way everyone knows that this comment was voted on, but that information is indelibly tied to you - an entity on the Fediverse.
Lemmy devs just chose not to a) show that information in a UI (plenty of other software out there does) and b) not inform people that was the case. Which leads to the whole point of the thread, hiding this from users merely gives a false sense of security.
Your world does not correspond to reality given that mbin already shows individual votes.
Head over to your comment on fedia.io and see who voted on your own comment.
Do you want to only vote on instances that defederate all mbin instances, and commit to keep doing so in the future?
Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn’t mean we should remove all restrictions. That’s a real twisted way of thinking.
What we have in place is already egregious imo, and a major flaw with the system in place.
