YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Option 1. has the highest chance of getting your changes but option 2. might work as well. I wish you luck if you choose these options.
Option 3. seems unlikely from your comments.
Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone. I'd like you to stay but I don't think the fediverse can accommodate your demands.
I'd like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. The Lemmy Devs do this for free for you. A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.
Option 4. is maybe the easiest option for you then. And I say that without wanting you gone.
Oh no, don't take this the wrong way. You've been perfectly amiable about this throughout this discussion, I have no reason to believe you'd want me gone. I am currently considering Option 4 indeed, though I want to stay for a bit to see how this all pans out. I have other issues and concerns with the fediverse anyway.
I’d like to point out a flaw with your analogy though: if you go to a restaurant you pay the people to make what you want. ... A better analogy is going to a potluck without bringing anything and being unhappy about the lack of steak.
That is a fair point, but this is a free service. There isn't any expectancy about one contributing to it.
Perhaps a more apt analogy from my perspective would be going to a free art museum and being disappointed there isn't any art I like, and several other people agree with me. I can ask the museum team to maybe get some more art in I and the others like, but it's up to the museum to do so, and I can't make art for shit and would take years to make something worthwhile. At worst, I just leave the museum, it owes me nothing, and I owe nothing to it.
I am generally shit at analogies though, so y'know, making an analogy is probably a bad idea.
I don't have anything technical to add to the discussion, I have absolutely no idea how Lemmy works, just that I despertately wanted somewhere else to go to that wasn't Reddit.
Still not even sure I understand how any of it works, although I do understand why there are privacy concerns and concerns around 'syncing' changes etc.
What I do want to say is that analogies aren't supposed to be taken too literally. That's kind of the point of them. :)
Yeah I'm just bad at making them without them being too literal, haha.
I'm sure loads of people have tried to explain it already. For what it's worth, my basic explanation (as I understand it) is as follows:
Reddit is run off servers owned by a single company, and those servers all talk to each other relatively nicely because they're all owned by the same entity. Lemmy is run off servers owned by lots of different people. These servers talk to each other because their owners have agreed to be "federated". However because of this they can also have more difficulties talking to each other, and individual owner's opinions can also get involved.