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.

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[–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

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.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Or the technology could just share the information it needs to share and not everything and anonymise the data ;).

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    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 be

    Edit: 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

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