To illustrate op's point I'm going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.

Then I'm going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.

Additionally, I'll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user's political affiliations and display the results.

Worst of all, I'm not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I'm spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.

I'll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.

Just kidding I'm not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.

The votes are public. Kbin displays them right in the UI. Lemmy semi-hides it, but it's never been designed to be private in any way.

Changing instance won't do shit if that's a concern to you. As an admin I can see them even if my instance isn't involved with the post at all:

Guys. The person running the website you use always can do and see everything

This has nothing to do with lemmy

Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it's not what people expect. But votes are very public.

We do see the votes. Publicly posting them sounds like poor form, but then what do you expect from crypto bros?

Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Running your own instance isn’t going to hide your votes.

Lol:

"All those account outside of monero.town are most likely angry commies that just follow posts from here to downvote."

People outside my echo chamber think I'm an asshole, it must be a conspiracy!

Oh good, Lemmy had no privacy. Not like that ability isn't going to be abused.

Either make it public right from the start everyone sees everything. Or make this crap not possible.

You're going to get echo chambers that start witch hunts. Someone is going to dox someone because they don't like how someone votes... Yadda yadda someone gets swatted or someone just shows up... Then someone's going to start cheering "We did it Lemmy!"...

Honestly at least with Reddit you had one single evil entity that would abuse their power and trust of users.

From what I understand votes are publicly available data, Lemmy just chooses to hide them to prevent the "chilling effect" where people feel afraid to vote honesty for fear of repercussions. Then they reintroduced it for admins so they can do their duties in stopping vote manipulation, for example people who go onto your profile and downvote literally every comment you make (it's already happened to me like 3 times) or those who use all of their alts to try and sway momentum on a comment their main makes. There's also times where there's no justification for a comment being upvoted; perfect example is when a nazi says "based" in response to an article about someone being racist and it gets like 20 upvotes. I don't think anyone reasonable would be against a banwave on something like that.

Obviously admins can see everything that goes through their servers for what should be obvious reasons, so this is more of a convenience thing. Moral of the story: don't join shitty crypto instances.

You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That's what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There's illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It's past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

I'd like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It's also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just "meh" and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.

I think the main complain anyone would have with this is, only we admin can look at the vote, and no one else can. This isn't a problem in Kbin or any other platform that allow one to do so.

I only check the vote to see if there's any brigading, other than that, i have no issue with other admins snooping or whatever. Ohh to be clear, all of us admin can see the vote everywhere, getting a new instance yourself will not solve anything.