Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
I think most users assume votes are private and most will have a similar reaction to learning about this unintuitive negative feature of anything built on ActivityPub, including Lemmy.
I think it is worth reading the actual discussion on github. Having votes public and having them visibly public on the web interface has compelling reasons. Namely enshittification hardening.
It’s also quite natural to stand by your words (or vote). I personally don’t think people should feel like the internet is their anonimized alt character of life. And if they need/want that, just do a throwaway account and hard vpn. Otherwise NSA (or equivalents) track us anyway.
