It’s actually a real problem on reddit where people spin up fake users to manipulate votes. Reddit hasn’t published how they detect that exactly, but one way to do that is to look for bad voting patters, like if one account systematically upvotes/downvotes another. But you pretty much can’t without knowing the votes.
True - but it’ll be much easier to detect.
That last point is completely impossible. Don’t forget that I don’t have to run the official lemmy software on my instance. I can make changes: for example, I can add a feature to my instance like “log every post in a separate, local database before deleting it from lemmy”. Nobody else but me will know this feature exists. Or (to be AGPL compliant) have a separate tool to regularly back up my lemmy database, undoing deletions.
As for the second point: I’d say making local votes private and non-local public will be worse for privacy due to causing confusion.
I’d go the other way: make these things officially public, so people know they are, and then aren’t taken by surprise.
Private voting can be tricky in a federated setting, because I could have a malicious instance that boosts my posts (I can have it with public votes too, but then it’s easier to detect). Truly private posting history is outright impossible, as you said, due to crawlers.
The way to privacy is to make sure not to dox your account, perhaps alternate 2-3 accounts if it’s really important to you.
Frankly, I think someone should actually do that. Except maybe use open source AI instead of ChatGPT.
The fact is, in a federated setting all this data will be accessible. For example, if lemmy tried to hide who made each vote, and just federate totals, that would allow my malicious instance to report 1M upvotes for my post.
When lemmy tries to hide this data, all this does is instill a false sense of privacy with users. IMHO the best thing is to make all this de facto public data, officially public, so everyone knows and can act accordingly.
As for privacy, I’d say the best thing to do is, keep your account anonymous.
I tried Mastodon at one point, but couldn’t enjoy it. They reject using recommendation algorithms in favor of chronological order. And I get their reasons, but that meant my feed was mostly full of things I didn’t care about, so I left. Things may be better now that they’ve added an ability to follow hashtags, I don’t know.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest.
That kinda misses the point, though. For me it’s more about promoting decentralization than it’s about whether people’s reasons to want to join all communities on a topic make sense (they actually can for niche topics). Without a feature like that, I fear people will just all join the largest community on the topic and “centralize” it.
I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic “technology”, and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we’ll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.
I’m hoping for two features: Let communities “follow” other communities - so one community’s content also shows up on the other. And let me group communities together on my personal feed, if they don’t want to follow each other for some reason. For now, I stay mostly on the home page, which aggregates everything - but I’d much prefer to be able to browse by topic and still have some aggregation.
If I was mostly staying on the home page, looking at the aggregate feed, I wouldn’t care. But since I tend to browse by community, I see it as a big problem actually.
Whether a specific reason for defederating is a good idea depends on the instance IMO. I don’t think a “general purpose” instance should defederate on ideological grounds.
That said, they should defederate instances whose members are too disruptive. But right now we only speculate how hexbear members will behave. We will only know once they actually federate.