MuddybulldogYSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
RyanHxPeople raise a good point that in countries where political dissent can actually be dangerous, this would very much dissuade people from voting on things they believe in, or even coming anywhere near Lemmy period.
A better approach I think would be to have the user’s host instance save their votes (the database obviously needs to remember what you voted on), but when federating those votes with other instances just hand over a cumulative total, e.g., “here on vlemmy.net we have +18 votes for this comment”, which the other instances can then add. There’s no need to send user information with that data.
Agreed, especially because I believe we’re headed for a repressive regime here in the US in about 2 years.
Places like this will need to get very careful if they want to remain bastions of free speech and places where people can come to find the information that will no longer be available in mainstream channels.
Lemmy is not a bastion of free speech lmfao