Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I wonder how you can federate anonymously while still maintaining defenses against vote manipulation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think you could probably do something like have the votes be reported in aggregate by the instance.

Any individual instance admin could use defences against vote manipulation by their own users, and other instances' admins could use defences against one particular instance being widely used for vote manipulation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I know some privacy oriented services (Brave Browser comes to mind) aggregate telemetry data like that to preserve privacy. Perhaps something like that is possible for Lemmy as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Someone could just run a rogue instance host all their bots on there, hiding it from anyone else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Right, but that’s where defederation comes in. Good faith admins can detect their own users and selectively ban them, while bad-faith admins running a server full of brigaders can be defederated if, for example, they detect anomalous patterns coming from that instance.