rodneyck

I have an issue with Fediverse, Lemmy to be exact. The platform is allowing an outside tool that was built for a mod or admin of a community to see votes, how people vote, but it is being exploited by users to spy/dox/harass, gang-up, and use as a tool to exploit other users nefariously. The tool is called Lemvotes. Here is a quote from a user (go $fsck yourself @ lemmy.world) who exploits this sharing how to use it with other users;

There’s a few ways of seeing votes. IMO they should be visible all the time. Moderators can see the votes of posts and comments in the subs they moderate. Admins can see all votes federated to their instance. Users have to use a separate tool for it. In this case I used Lemvotes.

This tool, imo, should be banned, or the platform to be “patched” to only allow this to work for admins, not users who abuse it.

GitHub - gragorther/votes: A tool to list a post/comment's votes on Lemmy

A tool to list a post/comment's votes on Lemmy. Contribute to gragorther/votes development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
Jul 4, 2025 at 3:33pmWeb
Show threadrglullisJul 4, 2025

There is no such thing as a “vote” in ActivityPub/ActivityStreams. This idea of “up/down votes” is just an abstraction of a message saying “Actor A liked B”, where B is an Post/Comment (and a post/comment itself just being an abstraction of ActivityStreams objects).

That is to say: there is no way to selectively hide the content a message. If you want federation to work and you want people outside your own server to see your posts, then the server needs to broadcast the messages to anyone listening.

Tools like lemvotes are just exposing this information. There is no point in trying to censor the tool, because this information is available publicly, and any motivated person will be able to track this information.

If you are concerned about what people think of your “likes” and “dislikes”, then do not use a public social media service and only communicate with provably secure communication tools.

Show threadMelmiJul 4, 2025

I think this is less a problem of “nefarious bad actors” and more a problem of expectations. Honestly, I agree with the quoted comment: I think they should be visible all the time, like they already are on Mbin. I think it would help change the way people think about votes so that they don’t expect Reddit-style anonymous votes and instead it’s a more public Facebook/Twitter-style like system.

If you really want private votes, Piefed has feature that lets you anonymize your votes, but a determined bad actor could still deanonymize you. I think it’s better to change expectations than to try to massage a fundamentally public platform into having private votes, but it’s good there’s an option for people since it’s so highly requested.