this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Yeah, it's actually ... a bit creepy.
Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.
Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.
I hate to suggest it but I wonder if a blockchain would work here
Blockchains are the antithesis of anonymity. Pseudo anonymity isn't anonymity, it just doesn't scream your name out there from the get go.
What aspect of the points mentioned in the thread do you feel are addressed by blockchain?
Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren't truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)
I'll admit I'm no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it's good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)
And to underline part of my comment, I did say "I wonder if..." rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work
Fedi technologies are already distributed. That's literally what federation is about.
Blockchain isn't private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.
Any privacy features you're imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a "normal", web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.
It's almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.
Check out videos involving crypto on the Cartoon Avatar's youtube channel such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq721IAqBo&t.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=-xq721IAqBo&t
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It likely could, but it's not trivial to implement.
Yeah, I'd imagine not, though I'm fairly confident any solution to this would be nontrivial
Fair point. Blockchain might be the quickest to implement just because the infrastructure is already established, even if it's not trivial. Not sure, though.
I was wondering about this. If they didn't keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.
One possible answer is to allow anyone to see votes categorized by instance, so you know where they're originating from.
Small/single user instances could be aggregated together/anonymized or maybe that's just the price you pay for having a single user instance.
I want the ability to see who down votes what but don't want to have other people see that about me. Ha