Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I’ve been in forums where upvotes were public. It’s not something that I expect to be anonymous by design.
That being said. If something is public, it should be clear that is public (and available to everyone), if it’s not it should be protected.
I think Lemmy should go one way or the other, or upvotes are public to everyone, or they are available only for you instance admins.
This is actually a very important point: Things being hidden from public view but yet not properly anonymous creates a mismatch of privacy expectation vs. reality. Votes may or may not terribly important information, but the user should be sovereign of their own data and to implement that in practice we can’t rely on people reading the code, or a TOS, or something, it has to be there for everyone to see:
If things can be seen on the backend then they should be seen by the public, if they can’t then they shouldn’t (well, also, can’t), as a general principle, not just for votes. One other big point is private messages, afaik they aren’t currently end-to-end encrypted. Gets a bit more iffy because key storage but “only the instance admin of the recipient’s instance can see messages” is low-hanging fruit.