I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question


To be 1000% clear, the voting agents on piefed worked just fine. They scrapped it because of forum politics. A few terminally online admins got real mad they couldn’t stalk user votes and threatened to defederate, even though they could easily just ban the voting agents if they wanted. They made up a completely absurd and roundabout premise that they needed to be able to preemptively ban people based on votes in case they might make a “harmful comment” in the future. The fact that this was the primary concern indicates that the functionality worked as intended.
Hopefully someone integrates the same functionality into an app. Honestly I’d take a swing at it if I had a bit more time.
This is the post I remembered.
This is what I meant with it failed because their halfhearted approach didn’t work out:
They could have just used private voting with every instance, but they just had to segregate them by trust because the good (according to authoritative selection) instances should still be able to see what you voted for, and that was too much work to keep up, so they just scrapped the entire system instead of implementing blanket private voting…