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

  • Mesa@programming.dev
    2·
    3 hours ago

    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.