I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I’m here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who’ll listen.

Votes are not private and never will be.

There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it’s better to just accept that votes are public information.

Personally I don’t see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don’t think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don’t care. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!

As a side note, Lemmy’s developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn’t be displayed publicly. For example, here’s an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn’t mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there’s an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.

I don't expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I'd spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff

I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.

From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,

Or just view them on lemvotes.org.

Stand by your vote.

Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.

I don’t expect my votes to be private, but I will vote as if they were. People reading too much into why someone might have voted a certain way and trying to shame them for it is embarrassing, I’m not going to constrain myself to reasons for voting that are immediately legible to anyone via only one bit of information just for their sake. If I want to downvote something with, for instance, a political message I agree with but the person phrased it in a way that goes against my pet peeves, I’m gonna do that, and I think the ideal would be for these numbers not to be taken very personally or seriously.

So basically I’d say it’s bad taste to put it in a UI, but only so far as it encourages people to be weird about it, and ultimately that’s on them.

On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.

Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there’s Lemvotes. It’s kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.

Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone’s vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that’s merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.

The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?

Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.

But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.

Zero. Use this site with a VPN and assume any data you put on here is being harvested.

Zero. Upvotes are a show of appreciation and I don't see why anyone would want that to be private. When it comes to downvotes, if you wouldn't want someone to know you downvoted something, you can't stand by that decision and so shouldn't have downvoted in the first place. Public reactions (alongside the self moderation features) keeps the fediverse honest and prevents the hostile type of downvote spamming you see on other platforms like reddit.

zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”

I wish my votes were even more public. If I’ve taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.

On Lemmy? As others have said, they’re automatically federated and so anyone can see them.

On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That’s how it should be. IMHO, more of y’all should use Piefed.