OmniGlitcher

But don’t do it as a protest. Do it because you don’t want to share that data publicly.

I mean yeah, that’s what I’d do it for. It’s a suggestion for the site and it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared by several people here, but it ultimately falls down to me to decide whether or not I want to continue using it, much the same as with my usage of Reddit.

If you’re worried about people collecting that data, then you shouldn’t have put it in public.

Voting is a core functionality of the site. It’s something I don’t think should be public as it puts more emphasis on what content I interact with in what is now apparently a public manner. If you want to debate that a mere vote is something I shouldn’t put in public, then fine, you do you. But for me, it defeats half the point of me even having an account here. What one comments on are often an incredibly small portion of what one actually votes on simply by ease of voting.

And I know I said “But Reddit…!” is a bad argument earlier, but even so, I’d like to say that even Reddit’s voting is not publicly accessible (as in not accessible by other users, even if Reddit almost certainly collects and sells such data), so clearly there should be ways to do it. If ActivityPub requires public voting and the people who have the ability to change it are unwilling or even unable to do so, then fair enough. But equally, I will refrain from contributing to such a site, which seems like a bit of a shame when it seems close to ideal otherwise.

You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

To some degree yes. However, I am simply a user. I have no idea where to even begin with attempting such a thing, and whilst I’m sure I could probably find out, even if I did it would take far longer to learn, nevermind getting it adopted. It’s a lot easier for the people running the site and who have knowledge of how to do so. It’s like going to a restaurant, not liking the way they’ve done the food, so the restaurant comes back with “Cook it yourself then”. The other “solution” is of course going to a different restaurant or simply not going to a restaurant. which if:

your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub

is truly the case, then it would seem that that is the only viable option for me personally.

And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote

I don’t care how people vote me. This isn’t strictly about downvotes, it’s about specifc content engagement.

And I really can’t imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

It’s potentially useful to someone. And I’d just rather not have that data public anyway, it’s just that simple. Enough data is already public, what types of content you actively engage with and how you engage with it also being public is just a bad idea in my opinion. These are core analytics almost any site collects, which imply they must have a purpose. Except here it’s public, and can also be swooped up by big companies should they dedicate a tiny fraction of computing power to run an instance.

I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don’t even know how we would make people aware of this.

Making these things directly accessible to end users would be a start. Have a stats button that shows who precisely voted what. Hiding this shit in the backend is just blatant obfuscation.

You’d have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time.

Then they should do so, these issues need to be fixed ASAP.

Still you’d need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof.

Obfuscating user IDs via a hash or something would seem like the way to make it work. I’m not a professional programmer, I only know a little bit of python, so I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense on that front. And whilst still not an ideal solution, but sharing non-private votes with your own instance admin and have them share only the total vote count with other instances is another solution. That way you need only trust your instance admin, which is choosable and can also be yourself.

That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.

Putting the onus on me is a shitty thing to do. I’m not the one running this site in any capacity, but this is an issue that many users are unhappy with. If the issue with the site won’t or even can’t be fixed, then I will simply not use the site. I don’t know how many people feel the same on that front, but I’d imagine there’s quite a few.

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

Ah yes, because the practical option is to be constantly switching accounts and instances based on what you want to look at for 5 minutes each.

There was a patent filed back in the Wii U days (September 2015) which also described a scroll wheel trigger. Looking back at it now, it seems very Switch-like, though people back then probably would have assumed it was a Wii U Gamepad 2. Maybe it was an old prototype for the Switch that they’ve converted into a Switch 2?

Here’s the patent, and here’s the linked PDF with some images.