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
At least when pouring my shit into Big Tech I can be reasonably sure that it disappears into the ocean of other data they have, and it’s exceptionally unlikely that someone with the access to do so would actually look into me specifically.
That any unhinged individual on the internet can pull out more information than strictly necessary about my online history is a completely different threat model. I understand that the federated model requires some level of data sharing to keep track of posts but I would kind of have expected that the instance that “owns” the post would be the only instance that needs this info.
On the other hand, I’m sure that absolute privacy like completely hidden post history to some extent will help bad faith actors with troll farms and bots so I don’t fucking know.
That’s fair.