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.
I don't have anything technical to add to the discussion, I have absolutely no idea how Lemmy works, just that I despertately wanted somewhere else to go to that wasn't Reddit.
Still not even sure I understand how any of it works, although I do understand why there are privacy concerns and concerns around 'syncing' changes etc.
What I do want to say is that analogies aren't supposed to be taken too literally. That's kind of the point of them. :)
