I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
Free speech just means the government isn’t allowed to punish you for only saying things (and even that had a whole constellation of big fuckin asterisks on it). Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.