Every time I see you pop up you’re writing incredibly sane things. You’re so much more polite and put so much effort into your comments compared to me (on all my accounts). I’m glad you’re contributing to the fediverse.

Also I agree and have seen similar things. Much as the orange hellsite is loathsome they do have better discussions than reddit (although they’re also largely populated by reactionaries, so you need to compare like with like). Removing downvotes was good, and I’m glad hexbear does.

I don’t think UIs should set expectations of privacy for users when something is public. And I don’t support information being available only to the motivated or technically capable as the first category is full of lunatics and the second is just technocratic elitism.

There isn’t really a way to do this. Because they need to be synced between servers, those servers have to know where the votes are coming from to decide what to show/count properly/provide at least rudimentary defense from spam.

Consider hexbear feds with dbzero, zero feds with world, hex doesn’t fed with world.

If a post lives on dbzero how should hexbear know what votes to display to its users? How should that a particular user already voted be remembered between page visits?

you could try some sort of cryptographic proof of trust but you’re basically reinventing block chain and making running lemmy an environmental disaster.

yeah an alternative proposal is they’re only public to the local instance admin and it groups its votes, sends them to the instance hosting the content, which adds them as totals annotated with the server.

But they’re still not private. Instance admins can see them, and you can still see which instances are voting on what content which doesn’t really improve much. Especially for small instances (e.g. if I have 10 people on an instance and only one user was active in a date range all votes are theirs).

Given how there are already problematic incentives to large instances I’m not sure we want to add to administrator (and everyone they care to share with) power based on size. Or deincentise users from signing up to small instances.

How does the server remember that the user has voted? Say I upvote this, random_user:1337_h4ck3r does the vote. For my UI to show me I’ve voted a record must be stored about my votes.

I am discussing possible implementations with someone, pointing out that necessarily votes are public to at least someone. Not endorsing it.

If you read my closing paragraph you will see I come down against private votes.

I don’t know if it’s intended but you’re coming across very aggressive and I don’t feel there is cause, even if I disagreed with you.

The weird thing about this whole debate is it’s already public, just only to an elite of people with basic technical skill and some cash to burn + all their friends.

I’m half tempted to spin up a server and just post the votes of everyone who federates to prove the stupid point.

I worry that the internet rather than provide people with access to information is providing people with too much wrong information and has actually resulted in huge swathes of people being turned into piles of brainworms, porn addiction and neuroses the likes of which have never been seen before in history.

I am mixed on this, I feel kinda this way but also literally everyone ever has felt this about their time and new technologies or trends. There is evidence that some people appear to be harmed by the light boxes of dopamine but evidence for broad harms is much less good. I can imagine worlds in which the internet was better, but also ones in which it is much worse. When we do look at stuff like worsening mental health outcomes in younger people it’s a giant mess of correlated thing, from soc med to worsening economic outlook, climate disasters, reductions in freedom, reductions in physical activity, enclosure etc. To point the finger at any one and emphasise it feels reductive.

If we have reasons to believe that making a technology is harmful we should not do that, but if a technology is available gatekeeping it behind something unrelated to potential to be harmful (e.g. in the votes case the ability to spin up a server. There is no reason to believe this correlates with sound judgement about exposing yourself to the information) is at best patronising. Generally elites have a really terrible track record of making decisions for other people. So I think once the genie is out of the bottle, absent strong evidence to do so, we need to give people access to it.

Bloobs adventure idle is an incremental game that’s basically what if runescape but inventory stacking and autopathing. It’s more active than most incrementals but maybe still more idle than you like?

Dwarf fortress maybe? particularly if you slow game speed a bit. you can designate stuff, set up management orders, and mostly wait for it to get done. It’s possible to be in very safe places and the game will usually pause if something significant happens (can disable for even more self running).

Your units are wrong! cried the teacher.
Your church weighs six joules — what a feature!
And the people inside
Are four hours wide,
And eight gauss away from the preacher!

Holy shit mate that’s awful. I haven’t had anything that bad but have had problems with spine arthritis constricting nerves.

Spent 2 years begging doctors to take me seriously, idk why but everyone seemed to assume I was exaggerating or hanging out for drugs. It sucked hard, I pretty much lost 2 years of my life to crying on a sofa and drinking through the worst pain.

Idk why this idea of people faking shit is so prevalent.