this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.
In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.
Which disincentives voting, choking off the thing needed to aggregate the content. Kind of underlining the problem with the votes being public.
Votes pretty much have to be public in order for the whole federated system to work -- otherwise anyone could just stuff 50 votes for their favorite comment, and there'd be no way to tell where they came from. Given that, I think it's important that the software be honest with people about the situation, "disincentive" or not. Personally I'm fine with my votes being public, but an important part of that is that I know they're public and can vote accordingly.
Not nessasarily, the protocol could be written so that an instance simply tells other federared instances "X of my users upvoted this, and Y downvoted this".
The tradeoff being that instance then have less tools to work with to moderate voting. Instead of being able to do global vote ring detection, the most they can do is look for abuse on their own server, and trust that every instance they vote-federate with does the same. Even then, with every instance trying to be vigilant, no one instance would have the info to detect a cross-instance abuse.
That would make it possible in general for any instance operator to game the system in ways that are by design impossible to analyze, for dubious benefit.
It would also involve some pretty substantial changes from the current ActivityPub protocol (not just a new way the protocol works, but a change to some of what are currently its core operating principles about e.g. deduplication of entities across the network). You'd have to either talk the authors of every ActivityPub software into accepting your new way, or else abandon the idea of your software being able to interoperate with other ActivityPub software.