We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.
I use people upvoting bigoted and transphobic content to help locate other bigoted and transphobic accounts so I can instance ban them before they post hate in to our communities.
This takes away a tool that can help protect vulnerable communities, whilst doing nothing to protect them.
It's a step backwards
I'm going to have to come up with set criteria for when to de-anonomize, aren't I. Dammit.
In the meantime, get in touch if you spot any bigot upvotes coming from PieFed.social and we'll sort something out.
The problem is, it's more than just the upvote. I don't ban people for a single upvote, even on something bigoted, because it could be a misclick. What I normally do is have a look at the profiles of people who upvote dogwhistle transphobia, stuff that many cis admins wouldn't always recognise. And those upvotes point me at people's profiles, and if their profile is full of dog whistles, then they get pre-emptively instance banned.
So you can still ban the voting agent. Worst case scenario you have to wait for a single rule breaking comment to ban the user. That seems like a small price to pay for a massive privacy enhancement.