From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes, but I'm curious at what the community's perspective on how "private" that is. I think Mbin already shows upvoters? Piefed allows anonymous voting. I also know there are sites which show all voting history, but assuming those are fairly disliked.

My general questions to the community: - Do you expect your votes to be private, or just not shown in the UI? - Would per-voter votes showing up on another aggregator platform bother you, even though your instance already shares them with other servers?

For context I'm the dev doing some two way bridge interop between atproto + Threadiverse, in atproto the votes/likes are generally publicly accessible, you just look at the users repo through something like pdsls.dev, they're readable and archivable by anyone. In my opinion this isn't that big of a problem since it's fairly hard to look at and discern (Ex all my votes: https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:lmdkqemqrqnfiix72pyjhfey/social.coves.feed.vote). Ultimately trying to figure out if there's already a mutual understanding that they are public and we can just mirror them or whether they should stay hidden as an aggregate.

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[–] JRaccoon@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 days ago

Well, if we wanna still have voting actions federate between instances and different services (meaning everyone can see the total vote counts, not just the votes given by users on single instance), that information has to be publicly sent to other instances. Like I said, I believe there have been some discussions about ways to anonymize outgoing voting actions, but I imagine there would be quite a few issues to think about. For instance, doing so would probably make it much easier for bad actors to send bogus votes.

The difference of opinion is that Lemmy's devs believe that services receiving voting data from Lemmy shouldn't publicly display individual votes, but only the aggregate counts (just like Lemmy itself does). Many others, myself included, think this approach creates a false sense of privacy, potentially leading some users to believe that their votes are private when they actually aren't, especially given that services like Lemvotes exist.