Lemmy

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Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago by o_o@programming.dev to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

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[–] PriorProject@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

I was a little skeptical of this assertion without any sources, but 10m of source scanning does seem to support it:

The ActivityPub message for a vote does seem to transmit the ID of the voter: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/v0.17.3-rc.2/crates/apub/src/activities/voting/vote.rs#L26
And the table for storing votes stores that id as well: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/v0.17.3-rc.2/migrations/2019-03-03-163336_create_post/up.sql#L17 (or did at one point, it's hard to get a complete schema just out of git).

I haven't looked for APIs to extract this data, it might only be available to an instance admin... but yeah Lemmy does not seem to aggregate vote histories, but rather stores them on a per-user basis.

[–] seacocker@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Is that ID local to the instance or universal across the fediverse?

[–] marius851000@lemmy.mariusdavid.fr 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The table that store upvote is named comment_like and post_like. Here, you have the vote’s unique id, the local user id that is linked to the it’s "global id", the local post id which is also linked to it’s "global id", the value of the vote (+/-1) and the date.

So votes are indeed totally not anonymous.

(and I run my server sinces less than a week, and the sum of entry in the two table is of 114 950 votes. Certainly enought for doing a bunch of analysis.)

Example of datas for the comment vote table (ids has been changed)

  id   | person_id | comment_id | post_id | score |         published          
-------+-----------+------------+---------+-------+----------------------------
     1 |        10 |          3 |      61 |     1 | 2023-06-17 20:01:20.948684
     2 |        34 |          1 |      22 |     1 | 2023-06-17 20:01:26.346783
     3 |        12 |          2 |      54 |     1 | 2023-06-17 20:01:27.627144
     4 |        20 |          7 |      91 |     1 | 2023-06-17 20:01:36.570636

Ping @PriorProject@lemmy.world

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