Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
367 points (95.5% liked)
Fediverse
30306 readers
719 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I know, but some people assume votes are private.
If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!
Lemmy likes aren't meant to be public, this is just other software failing to respect the privacy Lemmy indicates.
Oh. If the only thing stopping the votes being public is a label saying pretty please don't make this public then it does seem very open to abuse.
Especially in federated networks where the data isn't under access control, doubly so if the privacy extension is optional
That's almost as bad as using robots.txt to claim sites are private and secure and just whining that people/bots should respect it.
You should assume voter data is fully public and fully open. It otherwise is in the federated ecosystem.
The comparison doesn't work because both Lemmy and Mbin are implementing the same standard, while robots.txt is mostly an honour system.
Information not being private isn't the same thing as information being public.
Except ActivityPub data is by in large already not private, it is handed out to any tom dick and harry who run a server and have subscribed to actors on this one, and most of the time, it doesn't even really require extra authorization. That is fundamentally how ActivityPub and federation work, but you can't have any expectation of privacy in this system when it comes to the content shared. Expecting it to be private because it's labeled is as dumb as expecting your website not to get scraped because you said so in robots.txt.
I didn't say it was private, I said it wasn't public, there's a difference. If you asked me what number I was thinking of I'd tell you, but that's not the same thing as the number I'm thinking of being public information. ActivityPub is, at its core, about consent. We have consented to having our data be sent to any person able to serve 200 responses on an inbox endpoint by using instances with open federation. We could, if that makes us uncomfortable, moved to a closed federation system where we only accept request from an allowlisted set of instances, with software that follows the spec's public addressing system.
I'm not sure that is a realistic expectation these days.
It's not good practice. Really one shouldn't be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That's why Lemmy has local-only communities, the "private" community aspect that many people want just won't be federated, because you can't make something like this private otherwise.
I know, but most people don't.
I know, it's a really big problem here and on the Fediverse in general because people get so outraged and entitled over something that just is the way things are, this wouldn't work any other way.