The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:
**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: Itβs helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
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Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...
What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: Obligatory RIP my inbox.
People might have to stand behind their opinions if they choose to voice them. The horror!
(Although the user/account is still basically anonymous π€·ββοΈ)
There's a reason nobody has to publicly announce who their voting for in democratic countries, and that there's no mechanism to check that. People can be grouped, ostracized, persecuted, canceled, or worse.
You don't publicly announce it, but the government still knows it's you who voted. Except in this case the site is open source. Knowing who voted is the only way to prevent vote manipulation.
In the US, all elections are done by secret ballot. The govt can see that you voted, but not who you voted for
Okay, yea, that does make sense. I was thinking of electronic votes, in which case there wasn't much stopping them from storing that data. But you can get a paper ballet where your name isn't on it. Regardless, actual voting isn't a good analogy. You can change your vote on an internet forum, you cannot with a ballet.
Let's say on lemmy, up or down vote, it reported "Bazoogle has voted" and simply adds a number to the variable without my name tied to it. If I wanted to undo my vote, it wouldn't know whether to subtract an up vote or down vote unless it knew which one I did in the first place. The only other option would be to try and encrypt the username with some sort of identifier that can't easily be decrypted. Which might be possible, but is beyond my current knowledge of cybersecurity.
Itβs as simple as sharing vote counts but not individual identifiers between instances. Problem solved.
A user doesnβt even have to comment to be doxxed by publicly viewable upvotes. They upvote a post in a community for their local state, then upvote a post about how to get an abortion. The state subpoenas the instance admin and gets their IP and email address.
They could already do that with Reddit. Is that something that happens?
With Reddit that data could be kept between the users and admins.
I do not have any insider knowledge regarding whether Reddit has received requests for user data.
You were saying in the example of the government requesting the data. That's not any different for reddit or Lemmy. If anything, it would be harder to get from Lemmy since it's decentralized. And reddit is known to comply with government warrants.
Not all votes are private in this way, and we're not exactly voting for a new prime minister / president.
This is an issue of privacy, though. There is a reason why people dislike google or their neighbour having access to their information, however mundane.
Yeah, that's terrifying for a lot of people