Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
They could just make an account that’s not identifiable? Or only use their identifiable account sparingly. Or not have their upvotes be publicly damaging.
Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;).
It does. If it “anonymized” the data before broadcasting it to the federation, usernames would not be valid across federated instances.If I post on instance A as “John” but my username gets anonymized as “UserA893SAJ”, any instance other than A has no idea that that is John, and therefore it is just some anonymous user.It’s totally possible, but that’s not what Lemmy wants to beEdit: Yeah no, in cases where attribution is not necessary, like upvote/downvote, they really should be anonymized between Lemmy instances.
I wonder why it isn’t at the moment. Possibly just didn’t have the foresight. I could look into contributing that possibly if someone isn’t working on it already