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.
They can already datamine your posts.
But not my votes.
If I understand correctly they already can. It’s not user-facing, but votes are federated if I understand correctly.
Yes, that is why I am arguing in favor of an additional layer of pseudonymous voting.
Incorporating that in a way that doesn’t allow for vote manipulation by just lying to a server that different “anonymous” users have up or down voted a post sounds incredibly difficult, and not worth it for the narrow use case of “prevent my votes from being data mined even though all my comments can.”