First of all, because the Lemmy dev sucks at coding, and you guys are on ActivityPub, I can see all likes publicly anyways. What you're doing is like pretending Mastodon private posts are actually private. It's just an inconvenience.

You're the only one making vibes based claims about why Elon was right to hide likes.

This is typical ActivityPub jibber jabber. You had one bad experience with another user abusing a feature, so nobody else gets to have it. Guess what? People use blocking maliciously. I'm using the reply feature right now maliciously.

I'm stating the obvious about how much easier platform manipulation is for instance admins - who have a conflict of interest about this - and itinerant technoskulkers like me to be the only ones who can tell when something is fishy with the likes.

The "stop bullying" argument for destroying ActivityPub is always so fucking funny to me. You people removed quote tweets. I can't quote myself on basic Mastodon or search my own posts because people like you get taken seriously. But fortunately basic Mastodon sucks for many other reasons. It's no skin off my back. Just validates my instincts about these projects when people try to pass off their personal issues as a reason to make platforms worse.