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

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
      1·
      3 days ago

      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…

      • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Mastodon is built around individual posters. When you interact with a post, you interact with the author. Lemmy is built around “communities” (discussions forums) and individual threads/topics. Having multiple different servers handle the voting for a single thread makes much less sense.

        The obvious problem is that the author/their instance has a vested interest in up/down votes.

        To me votes are a way to signal to others if they should bother reading something. I’m not quite sure how that works on Mastodon. I don’t think likes influence visibility outside the home instance?

        The author is interested in getting their message out. Think about someone trying to sell stuff, for example. They would want to manipulate the visibility/apparent popularity of a post. Such a party would also be most interested in the identities of supporters/detractors.

        If you wanted to create psychological profiles, you could create bait messages and observe the reactions. That would be much more effort, but if that is a concern, then that probably isn’t good enough.

        • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
          1·
          3 days ago

          The obvious problem is that the author/their instance has a vested interest in up/down votes. […] The author is interested in getting their message out. Think about someone trying to sell stuff, for example. They would want to manipulate the visibility/apparent popularity of a post. Such a party would also be most interested in the identities of supporters/detractors.

          That is the same on every social media platform, including Mastodon

          I don’t think likes influence visibility outside the home instance?

          Likes don’t affect that at all, boosts or shares or retweets or whatever they are called affect that and are sent to the author and your followers

          If you wanted to create psychological profiles, you could create bait messages and observe the reactions. That would be much more effort, but if that is a concern, then that probably isn’t good enough.

          At the moment this is very easily achievable in the threadiverse. You just sub to a community and you get everything you need from that community. With my proposal this would be much harder to achieve, as you’d only get the information from people interacting with you, or, if we’d shift it to the community actor, you’d have to control the instance of the community. Sure still possible (it always will be) but a lot harder

          • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            Likes don’t affect that at all, boosts or shares or retweets or whatever they are called affect that and are sent to the author and your followers

            That changes the calculus. With something that is just a private thumbs up, like a DM, the stakes are much lower.