From a technical standpoint, it's not different from Reddit. The only difference here is that normal people can host their own instances, whereas Reddit is only hosted by the company and they can keep it under wraps.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Agreed from a technical standpoint.
But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.
I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?
Yeah, I wonder how you can federate anonymously while still maintaining defenses against vote manipulation.
I think you could probably do something like have the votes be reported in aggregate by the instance.
Any individual instance admin could use defences against vote manipulation by their own users, and other instances' admins could use defences against one particular instance being widely used for vote manipulation.
I know some privacy oriented services (Brave Browser comes to mind) aggregate telemetry data like that to preserve privacy. Perhaps something like that is possible for Lemmy as well.
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but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
Which kbin.social does.
Maybe you could hash the user and post together somehow this way it is hashed but also unique per post. If you only hashed the username then the entirety of the user's voting history would be known if the hash was reverted.
Could be hashed and salted, with a random salt.
The trouble is, then, that it’s harder to disallow users from voting multiple times if the voting user isn’t on the post’s home instance.
Couldn't someone vote multiple times anyway by just having a bunch of different accounts?
Yes, true, the current system does allow that. But the current system also doesn’t allow users to accidentally vote twice (and it remembers your vote)— this is the feature I think would be more challenging to implement if we were to hash & salt the user's ID.
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Hashing can't effectively protect known values. If you want to know if someone voted for a post you can just hash their username and post ID. This is trivial and cheap.
If you want to know who voted on a post you just find every username you can find and hash it. It isn't super cheap but isn't very expensive either. There are only 8G people on the planet, many bitcoin rigs can calculate this in seconds. Sure, you can use a more expensive hash and there may be more accounts than people but it will remain feasible.
This is the same reason you can't hash phone numbers in a meaningful way.
The best option is probably just for the instance to report counts and you just have to trust it. If it is noticed that an instance seems to be inflating votes you stop counting its votes. People can work together to create blocklists for known cheating instances. Your instance would still know this but at least it is within your trust, not federated publicly.
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In fact, Reddit has suspended people for upvoting before.
True, but in Unidan's defense, it was a jackdaw, not a crow.
We need Unidan back now more than ever 🤗🐦⬛
Multidan.
You're kidding surely. That's actually awful. Any source for this? Would love to read more about it.
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This would be interesting to see if certain articles were pushed up or down by bot accounts.
This could be anywhere from news articles being buried/promoted or by hidden advertising within a post.
True! Also instances could each do their own brand of “vote manipulation mitigation” by counting or ignoring different sources of votes.
Other cool features come to mind, like having a separate vote count for voters from the local instance.
Other cool features come to mind, like having a separate vote count for voters from the local instance.
That'd be cool. Like a big colorful number representing the total votes and then a smaller number right below that in parenthesis and a gray color to indicate local instance votes.
That's interesting, tho I'd rather have that info seen by admins only, it could lead to brigading/harassment otherwise IMO.
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When us older folks say "Anything you put on the public internet should be considered public and recorded forever", it's because of that.
On the other hand, I don't really trust Reddit with my upvotes/downvotes all that much more than random users, so I already refrain from voting on content I wouldn't want to be associated with....
Of course, Reddit can still see what posts I view, while that isn't the case for Lemmy (at least since I self-host an instance).
It's also technically not on Reddit either. Letting people see what you up/downvoted is a setting that you can toggle as desired, although I believe that it defaults to "off".
Im sorry for the stupid question but can someone explain the difference between lemmy and Kbin?
I just recently created a kbin account and downloaded the kbin app but see a lot about lemmy on here. Is kbin a subset of lemmy? If I want a wider variety of content would I go to lemmy or kbin?
Again, sorry for the stupid question.
Not a stupid question at all!
Lemmy and Kbin are two different systems that talk to each other. Like how Gmail and Outlook are two different systems, but you can still send emails between them.
So you can make posts over there on Kbin and I can upvote them from over here on Lemmy.
Make sense?
Most Lemmy instances and kbin are connected/federated to each other meaning that the content is available to both. For example, the thread you currently are replying to is on the Lemmy.ml instance. So in general you don't need to worry if the content is on a Lemmy instance or on kbin. You will see it anyway. So you can just pick the instance you like the UI best and use that.
There is a small caveat, in that a magazine/community will only start federating/being visible on a remote instance after someone visits that community for the first time. E.g if someone creates a new community on kbin, then it is only visible on kbin until someone goes to newcommunity@kbin.social on their instance. And also other way around. If someone makes a new community on Lemmy.world you won't see it on kbin until you it someone else goes to newcommunity@lemmy.world on kbin.
Just from what I understand myself, it's that they are two different software setups. But they both use the ActivityPub standard that all federated content is using. KBin is different though in that it's trying to be more like Twitter with Sub Reddits, than like Reddit with Tweeting. And Lemmy is just purely trying to recreate the Reddit experience. So like on Twitter, Mastadon, and KBin upvote is more of a like and people can see what accounts "like." KBin and Mastadon share the same 'microblogging' feature which is like twitter. From what I understand they share microblogs across the fediverse.
And Lemmy and Kbin share communities/magazines together thanks to federation. So you're on a magazine in KBin but I'm on Lemmy on Lemmy World looking at this community from Lemmy.ml interacting with you.
Overall I think if you like Twitter and Reddit and are fine with your entire history of actions being public KBin is perfect. If you just want a Twitter experience, Mastadon. If you want some more obscurity with your account like Reddit and only the Reddit experience, Lemmy.
Right now I think KBin's feature parity isn't too far off from Mastadon and Lemmy. But like the rule of any thing that combines two tools, it can't be better than both separately. I think as Lemmy and Mastadon matures into their niches KBin will almost exclusively be playing catch up with both in the long term.
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Wasn't part of the reason for anonymous voting and even "blurred" voting so accounts that were shadowbanned wouldn't know it and go create a new bot account to spam more?
If I remember correctly, another reason was so that bots wouldn’t get usable feedback from voting.
Because in order to federate, user data needs to be shared, including the username. It prevents double votes from the same account and also allows votes to be rescinded at the user's discretion, at which point the instance will send effectively an undo signal for the activity.
The first rule of the Fediverse is to make sure you're perfectly okay with the entire internet seeing your account activity, including votes and favourites. If you're unsure or are worried you might regret it, best not to post it at all. This is equally true on all social media but the way the Fediverse works just makes it more obvious.
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