Snitches get stitches

The very nature of Federation means that all data needs to be openly shared between platforms, so even if there's some info you don't see on your client of choice, assume that every single interaction you have with the platform is public.
- And that's why hornyposting on main is an even worse idea than normal
  
  Unless? ( ˶o˶˶o˶) !! jk jk....
- While that is very much true, but I find it debatable if you (as in the dev) want the user facing UI to show it.
  
  But even if platforms agree to not make the data visible, anyone can spin up their own instance and browse through the backend data that is being sent. It's the ActivityPub protocol itself, not the individual platforms that use it.

Serious question: Why should they be private?
I know they're private on Reddit, but so what? It's not exactly sensitive information, and I can see many benefits to having them be publicly viewable. Namely preventing bot farms or people creating hundreds of alts to upvote their own fresh takes, or downvoting stuff they disagree with into oblivion.
I've always seen it as a shorthand for dropping a comment saying "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" which would have your username against it
- While this arguably doesn't prevent anything on its own, it might expose what you just said - bot farms and sock puppets.
- on Reddit, you used to be able to opt into having your upvotes down on your user page
- Copying my own reply from a similar thread last month, the problem is that most users don't know they're public:
  I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
  Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
  
  And you also have to consider how other platforms treat upvotes and downvotes.
  On many platforms, your upvotes and downvotes are not only visible, but sometimes result in a notification alert (i.e. someone commented on your post, someone liked your post, someone downvoted your post, etc.). It is not anonymous at all.
  
  We are in a world where big data is being collected and stored and analyzed by AI for every activity on the Internet, as well as an era of creeping global authoritarianism, and you are confused by why some people might be concerned about leaving an extremely granular, public, and permanent record of how they vote? Or rather, why they might strongly prefer that not be public?
  
  who cares, yall are so paranoid about everything, have the self awareness to know that you aren't important, let the corpos dox me and have all my upvote/downvotr information ill survive
  
  Ok, making people aware that they're not private, fine. That should be done, but only really because people are coming from Reddit and expecting them to be private.
  if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight
  I think if anyone tried to pick a fight with me over downvoting them, I'd just feel sorry for them for a second before blocking them. Not saying there aren't people like that, but they have to be very far and few between.
  Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, , or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be
  This seems extremely far fetched to me. If someone is going to dox you, it's going to be from your comments, not because you upvoted something. I just don't buy that. I can't even think of a hypothetical scenario where an up/downvote in isolation could be used to dox someone - feel free to propose one if you can
- Yeah, back when I first got started on kbin I thought the ability to see who upvoted and downvoted would be a boon to civil discussion on the Fediverse - it meant you couldn't sling mud anonymously. One of the most annoying things on Reddit is debating with someone that's insta-downvoting everything you say. I was saddened when all the major Fediverse clients all got rid of that.

Precision:
downvotes are only visible on Tesseract to mods of the community
upvotes have been visible on Mbin forever
- I can see upvotes and downvotes.
  I can see the list of users that upvoted every post/message.
  I used to be able to see a list of users that downvoted. (data is there, just hidden)
  So everything you ever upvote/downvote is tracked and everyone can see it at some point.
  Your comment history is public, as is your upvote history.
  
  How do you see downvotes? I was only able to see upvotes via this
  The "Reduces" button cannot be clicked

I'm just upvoting MLP memes, don't mind me

I personally think public downvotes should be a thing, people would think twice about downvoting unnecessarily.
- I believe people should be able to downvote whatever they want. People should be allowed to go against the hivemind. PieFed implements pseudonymous downvoting. For anyone worried about spam, they have powerful tools to allow admins to filter out people who do not contribute to the community, e. g. just go around downvoting everything.
  
  I have no problems with people downvoting stuff. But if you're willing to downvote something, you should be willing to stand by it instead of being anonymous.
- There is no such thing as an unnecessary down vote
  
  Allow me to demonstrate

fuck bronies