We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).

As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.

ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.

That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.

To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.

This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.

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[–] Jilanico@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

Interesting solution 👍 Curious to see how this plays out!

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (8 children)

Its strange to see one of my posts being used as a reference. All I was trying to do was share something cool.

I do agree though. When up/downvotes (especially downvotes) are fully public, it leads to trolls getting angry and lashing out on individuals in a semi-public way. And if you can see ALL of that individuals voting patterns, then we get people strategically making tools to go after people that vote certain ways. Theres a reason anonymous voting is a thing outside of the internet as well.

If this goes live in lemmy.world i will be looking at other places to post/interact with. Love lemmy (and contributed to the codebase as a dev) but I cant be bothered with trolls.

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[–] PierreKanazawa@fedia.io 5 points 8 months ago

That's pseudonymous!

But all kidding aside, it sounds good

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it's harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.

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[–] can@piefed.social 4 points 8 months ago

Neat

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

How does this work with moderation? I.e. what happens if I ban the real user from a Lemmy instance? What if I ban the alternate user?

Also, what happens if on Piefed, a user votes for something, then they change the setting and then they vote for the same thing again? How would a Lemmy instance know if it should count the vote or not, since the original user didn't actually vote from Lemmy's point of view?

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[–] light@noc.social 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

@rimu is there a forum style ap implementation that can talk to lemmy communities (I'm assuming that piefed can) without voting?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 8 months ago

Not that I know of.

You could achieve this by installing a Lemmy, PieFed or Mbin instance (whichever you find easiest to install and customise), in the admin area set the sorting options to a sensible default ("New", or "Active", perhaps) and then add a small snippet of CSS that hides the voting information.

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 4 points 8 months ago (6 children)

So I've been thinking about this and I would go for a different approach.

Admins can set voting to be public or private on a server wide level.

When users vote, a key is created as the userid

The votes table is essentially: voteid, postid, userid, timestamp, salt, public

If the vote is private, userid is salt(userid, password)

And it's that simple.

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 4 points 8 months ago

Cool solution!

[–] cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is it possible to double vote this way (once on each account)? On second thought, would it even matter? A malicious actor could have multiple accounts.

[–] andrew_s@piefed.social 5 points 8 months ago

No, the other account isn't something you can log into or interact with. PieFed knows whether I've already voted on something, so it won't let me vote again by changing the 'vote privately' setting.

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