As it was recently discussed a lot of the data you generate while using the fediverse is public. If we’re looking at the threadiverse even more of it is public including your votes.

I only know the specifics of Mastodon and mbin, so maybe @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and other devs can chime in here.

Voting on Mastodon is a lot more private than voting in the threadiverse. Only the author of a post (and their instance) knows everyone who voted on a post. Everybody else can retrieve the total numbers, but not the individual votes. Of course this comes with the downside that everyone else has to fetch this data and while the instance could send an Update activity - informing other instances that the numbers changed - Mastodon currently does not do that.
In the threadiverse on the other hand, every single vote gets send around the network, including all the details.

I would like the threadiverse software to get a bit better at privacy. Mastodon is often restrictive with activities for that exact reason and while I do not want to completely screw visibility by not sending anything to anyone, I think the visibility of votes can be improved a lot.

So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. The magazine then announces this Update activity to all its subscribers. The post object has to contain the relevant numbers of course and Mastodon and PeerTube use shares, likes and dislikes (PeerTube only). These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted, that would defeat the purpose (looking at you PeerTube)

Because nobody wants to break federation with other software, it would be nice if this could be coordinated between all the threadiverse actors

  • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 hours ago

    It’s not clear why voting should be private when posting is not. Your posts reveal much more about you than your votes. Voting only signals to other people that you believe the content is good/a waste of time. Eventually, the arguments for anonymous posting/voting are the same.

    It is a problem that it is obfuscated that votes are public. When people don’t know that, then they may be tricked into revealing things they might not otherwise.

    I believe there is a place for both anonymous and pseudonymous posting/voting, but not for half measures. Anonymous and pseudonymous posting shouldn’t be mixed. That just opens the floodgates for all sorts of manipulative practices.

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
      2·
      8 hours ago

      The main reasons for me:

      1. People are not used to votes being public, because (afaik) it was just not this way on “traditional” social media (there only the operators might have had access)
      2. Votes being public affects far more users than posts, because only a small subgroup of all users actually post anything
      3. Votes being private is (imo) much more achievable, as they contain the same message each time either “I like” or “I dislike”, more information than that is not conveyable in up- and down-vote-buttons
      • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 hours ago

        1. The problem with trad SoMe is that it is monopolistic. That’s because these companies “own” the data and gate-keep access. If you want open social media, you must not have a gate-keeper. Which means that you can’t have someone who controls access. That’s a fundamental trade-off.

        2. So what? Should posts be anonymous as long as they are short?

        3. No. It’s always data+owner. It doesn’t matter if the data is only a single bit.

        • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
          1·
          7 hours ago
          1. Doesn’t change the fact that people are used to their votes not being seen by other users
          2. Don’t know what that has to do with me saying that more people vote than post
          3. of course it is easier with always the same one bit information as it is for something that can be one word or 50k words that are basically never the same. Plus the fact that people want the things they post to be seen, but not necessarily their votes
          • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            1. Yes, people are used to monopolistic social media. Doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an alternative. There simply are a lot of things that you cannot do without an authority that grants or denies access to data. If you want the advantages of openness, you have to accept the downsides.

            2. I don’t know how that is an argument for anything. If people are more comfortable voting and not posting, maybe we should make posting anonymous.

            3. Repeating a rejected assertion is not going to convince. You strip the username from data. Give me some reason why it would be easier when the data is short. People want their posts to be seen. That doesn’t mean they want their usernames seen.