I really wanted to post this on !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net but I’m not trans myself and I didn’t want to take up their space.
Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing, frankly as a cishet dude.
But also… I’ve kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won’t make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic’s transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don’t matter to the Lemmy dev team…to be charitable…so I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
Afaict that’s just how activitypub works, it’s not designed to make anything anonymous. Votes are public to anything federates with the instance already, you just can’t access them through the lemmy ui. But they’re not anonymized in the activity stream.
The proposal is instead of federating each vote, each instance sends an anonomized vote count which is the total of their users. That and tokenizing users in vote objects. That and the piefed method: https://lemm.ee/post/40074176
Wait are those separate proposals? Removing individual votes vs tokenizing users in individual votes
The relying on instances to compile and anonomize votes is one proposal that would require a change in standards. The easy solution is giving every user their own “voting profile” which is a random username and handles all voting. This is what piefed uses and the admins are unable to see user votes, but can deanonomize users with enough effort.