I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It’s why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Aw, shoot. It doesn’t seem to work for PieFed. For example, here’s a link straight to the original instance and thread: https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1701717/
Changing that “p” to “post” didn’t seem to work, either.
I’m also on fedia and I can see who upvoted and boosted a comment / thread / post.
Fedia.io is also an mbin instance, you are speaking about the same thing.
Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.
Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don’t know how it is with other software.
I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don’t miss it. I think it took me about a week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.
If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I’ll report it.
Even DMs?
ActivityPub is public by design and admins can easily read DMs. Not sure about it Joe public can read any dm.
Admins of most services where data aren’t encrypted can read data that is not public so I’d assume that by default.
Now my question specifically is about “Joe public”.
Yes.
I don’t know of any clients that publicly show it, but the information is sent out as a json that can be read by anyone setup to receive them.
Thanks for the clarification but is it for non-local DMs only or even local DMs and if so why?
Hmm I’m not sure if it affects local.
Because they’re basically the same as a post or comment, it’s how the fediverse works. They get sent out to anyone listening, and whoever is listening directs it where to go i.e. a community or users inbox. So all instances can update with a new post to their users who are subbed. In theory the DM would get ignored by everyone else who isn’t the target, but one could easily set it up to not do so.