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.

  • Exosus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.

    • AncientMariner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      So no known user will ever have a desire to join. Malicious actors will dig out their votes and expose it publicly. Could be massively damaging. You cannot do that with other social media. Obviously those companies have that information, but they do not share it.

      • james1@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You cannot do that with other social media.

        Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.

      • rigatti@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • ghostermonster@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Not true. Internet is an example of decentralized system and it supports encryption 😉. Matrix is nice decentralized chat protocol, with E2EE.

      It’s just that the ActivityPub is design for public things. Not a problem when we know and remember it.

    • Muddybulldog@mylemmy.winOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      To those of use who understand how it works, yes. Five minutes in Lemmy support makes it obvious that there are many people who DON’T understand how it works. Hence, YSK.

    • sparr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      That’s not true, it’s just very computationally expensive to make it secure and private. There are cryptographic solutions these problems.

      • astral_avocado@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Good luck building a performant version.

        Although I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t built a Tor version of Lemmy/mastodon yet… imagining no home instance control, you’re just donating hosting to a truly decentralized website that nobody controls but anyone can post to. It would be the ultimate dissent tool.