A more private way to distribute votes

As it was recently discussed a lot of the data you generate while using the fediverse is public. If we're looking at the threadiverse even more of it is public including your votes.

I only know the specifics of Mastodon and mbin, so maybe @rimu@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @julian@community.nodebb.org and other devs can chime in here.

Voting on Mastodon is a lot more private than voting in the threadiverse. Only the author of a post (and their instance) knows everyone who voted on a post. Everybody else can retrieve the total numbers, but not the individual votes. Of course this comes with the downside that everyone else has to fetch this data and while the instance could send an Update activity - informing other instances that the numbers changed - Mastodon currently does not do that.
In the threadiverse on the other hand, every single vote gets send around the network, including all the details.

I would like the threadiverse software to get a bit better at privacy. Mastodon is often restrictive with activities for that exact reason and while I do not want to completely screw visibility by not sending anything to anyone, I think the visibility of votes can be improved a lot.

So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. The magazine then announces this Update activity to all its subscribers. The post object has to contain the relevant numbers of course and Mastodon and PeerTube use shares, likes and dislikes (PeerTube only). These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted, that would defeat the purpose (looking at you PeerTube)

Because nobody wants to break federation with other software, it would be nice if this could be coordinated between all the threadiverse actors

So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted

What’s to prevent the author from faking upvotes, if the votes themselves aren’t public?

If you have malicious software, then nothing. Nothing prevents malicious software to invent users who create like activities either... So in my opinion nothing changes about that

Na, having votes in the public means you can spot bad actors over different communities.

Remember when Reddit removed the individual post counts and only gave the % to make manipulation easier, or YouTube removing the thumbs down count so you don't know if a video is good or bad anymore?

Hiding information makes making an informed decision harder.

Absolutely disagree
Social media is inherently public. Everything here should always be completely public. Nobody should ever think anything they do here is private at all.

My private social media is Signal. All my real world friends use it for our personal communications.

I preferred kbin's completely open display of votes for each post/comment within the software and not even needing to do a third party site check. I will take a few people completely misreading intent over obscuring it so that it is far easier to do real vote manipulation.

Voting should not be secret.

It seems that the assumption is that there are not and will never be spambots on the Fediverse.

At least, the source of truth shouldn't be the author of the post.

Stop thinking in terms of "votes". Think of the activities as a "fixed content messages": John liked this. Alice liked that. Bethany did not like that other thing. Each "vote" is a meaningful interaction. A server that says "2734 people did not like your message" means absolutely nothing.

This is not a political council nor a popularity contest. No one will make critical decisions based on the amount of worthless Internet points.

I do not understand arguments about privacy when we are talking about a public, social network. Social interactions online do not need to be that different from real-world interactions. if you are not willing to say "I did not like / I disagree with you" to someone personally, then you shouldn't say it at all.

That's more effort to do and easier to detect.

> @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de said in A more private way to distribute votes:
>
> So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to.

My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.

The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.

Fwiw when someone upvotes on NodeBB, it gets blasted everywhere too!

I would recommend that votes continue to be sent to group actors, who then decide whether to announce it (old behaviour) or keep quiet and wait for the update before announcing (new behaviour).

It would mean vote synchronization would be less reliable however.

Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social's vote batching proposal.

My problem is not saying it to the person itself, my problem is that you can build a rekatively detailed personality profile based on the things someone likes. My proposal was that everything goes to the author and the author alone

Ok.I see. Personally I don't think it's a good idea. It's only a marginal benefit in terms of protection against data scrapers (you can also build that profile based on who they follow, or what they write about...) and it makes things more difficult for moderators and hides important information from other community members.

I prefer to receive individual vote activities because then my blocks and defederations will remove votes from instances that I don't want.

e.g. I'm using instance A and subscribed to a community on instance B. Posts in there receive votes from instance C but because I've defederated from C (for vote manipulation, perhaps), none of the votes from C have any effect on me. They would have an effect on B and that's good - it's up to them.

My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.

The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.

That is true. It could of course be changed to send it to only the group instead of the author

Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social 's vote batching proposal.

Can you link me to it. Seems that I missed that

Also sensible. What do you think of sending it only to the group actor instead of the author?

Ah that is interesting, I missed that the first time.

So the author instance would be responsible for federating activities, not the instance hosting the community? That could be very beneficial for spreading load across the network! But maybe it would complicate moderation because the author could ignore moderator's commands to delete the post and stop federating it.

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Only regarding to votes, but yes. So only the author receives votes and then distributes the update activities containing the new vote counts to the group and the author's followers. I totally see the potential for abuse, I don't if that potential is to big or if it is negligible... Mastodon seems to think it is fine...

It's not clear why voting should be private when posting is not. Your posts reveal much more about you than your votes. Voting only signals to other people that you believe the content is good/a waste of time. Eventually, the arguments for anonymous posting/voting are the same.

It is a problem that it is obfuscated that votes are public. When people don't know that, then they may be tricked into revealing things they might not otherwise.

I believe there is a place for both anonymous and pseudonymous posting/voting, but not for half measures. Anonymous and pseudonymous posting shouldn't be mixed. That just opens the floodgates for all sorts of manipulative practices.