No, you’re not missing out on anything. You can have multiple accounts if you wish, you can have one. Short of an instance going down that you have your account on, you can interact with it all.

Official as in a centralized server with all the “main” stuff? No. Each server might have its own News community.

There isn’t yet, but with the way Lemmy mods are going, it won’t be long. Starting to get some whiffs of mods banning people because they’ve voted wrongly on posts. Lemmy is unique in that it lets mods see what you’ve up/down voted.

In reaponse to your #3 point - this is absolute fucking ridiculous. This type of bullshit will kill Lemmy.

Votes being public is one of my main turn offs of Lemmy. Anyone can host their own instance that federates with everyone and peek inside the database and see everything you’ve ever up voted or downvoted. I have personally done this just to confirm my suspicions that it is possible. I don’t vote on a lot of things I otherwise would because I don’t want people making assumptions about me. For example, if I see a copy/paste bot spamming a pro trans comment, even though I agree with the message, I might want to downvote because it is a spam bot. But I’m afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I’m transphobic.

Interesting, I was of the understanding that the individual vote attribution doesn’t leave the community’s home instance and only aggregated counts are federated.

Given an instance spun up for this purpose would not host any communities I’d be interacting with, it wouldn’t get much more information than you can get through the UI/API

Am I wrong on this?

I hosted my own instance and was able to see the usernames of people who voted on communities that were not hosted on my instance. To prove my point, I had posted the list of votes on a comment that was claiming it was impossible to do this.

Well that’s not good news. This feels like a bit of a problem because a lot of people probably wouldn’t vote on stuff they otherwise would out of fear of attracting the attention of some nutjob with too much time on their hands.

It kinda flies in the face of the “downvote (and maybe report) then move on” attitude that most of us will have taken on from Reddit.

I wonder if the devs have plans to correct this as I don’t see how this won’t limit engagement from good users aware of this and amplify toxic ones (due to people fearing retaliation).