We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).
As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.
ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.
That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.
To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.
This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.
I mean, is that truly the case? If a user only engages in vote manipulation, but otherwise they have insightful comments/posts, is it really that big of a deal that you will ban only their option to vote?
I think you're conflating my two separate concerns. One's automated vote manipulation. The other is targeted harassment.
Looks like it's kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it's a bitch without an API.
If I have an insightful contributer who's going out of their way and outside of their normal communities to be a dick to another user, maybe they're not so insightful after all. Or they've got a great reason!
Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.
What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.
I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don't think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.
And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their "main" account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).