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
You made assumptions about my social media use that are wrong. I don’t interract with them because I don’t like the way they are run and the data they gather will for sure be used against me. I interact with the fediverse because it doesn’t start from a point of abuse, but it can very clearly be abused and I would honestly prefer that this particular information would not be available in any way since it is the most frictionless but also the most potentially exposing way you interact with this platform.
They weren’t so much assumptions about specifically your usage, as I wasn’t really speaking directly to you. Regardless of your specific situation, I still stand by my final point.
Additionally, the availability of votes is largely a technical issue. It’s been explained better and more in-depth than I have time for at the moment, but the idea (as far as I remember) was that because of Lemmy’s instanced hosting nature, your votes are visible to instance operators anyway, and since that’s not a particularly tough boundary to cross (nature of federated web), they just left it extended to all users.
Someone correct or fill in information I’ve missed.