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.
That’s what I thought about votes too. I’d be very happy to know that you can’t access ips the same way you can votes on other nodes by simply being an admin on a given node. Honestly, I never would have guessed lemvotes could exist.
That’s just how a federated exchange needs to work, though. Without sharing which user is creating activity, there would be no way of verifying the legitimacy of activity without some convoluted blockchain process. On the other hand, sharing IP addresses isn’t just unnecessary but more involved.
There’s frankly no point in making votes private, anyway. Why should it matter who knows how you vote?