I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. "Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt" is my go-to justification.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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I just blocked my votes from federating. it's nobody's business what I upvote.
If your votes don't federate then they have no effect other than you seeing the arrow light up.
I like your style
The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv
I'm pretty sure the Pub doesn't stand for Public, but rather Publish.
edit: not saying that it is private, just my opinion on whether the pub is an adjective or a verb
Still Publish, not Privish.
You are right but you can’t exactly publish something and expect it to be private
And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?
Indeed it does. However my intention was to say that Pub in ActivityPub is most likely not an adjective (public), but a verb (publish).
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This one is gold :)
Isn't the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don't want to take a stance on something at all, you don't have to.
It's an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don't want to.
As far as I'm aware, the votes don't really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn't seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I've never seen a post removed because the user didn't have enough karma, etc.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
On other platforms, it's a mechanism to assign a sort of "social worth" to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like "Reddit but federated." Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
There are communities on certain instances that have auto-moderators that take into account upvotes to ban/unban people.
Piefed also by default collapses any comment that has a negative vote. if the comment gets downvoted even further, it can even be shadowbanned by being hidden from anyone on Piefed. although you can change that or opt out, if you prefer to see every shitty take. Piefed also places bright warning icons next to the names of anyone with a bad rep. there's quite a lot of personal control over what you see if you use Piefed.
Interesting! Not something I've encountered, but I suppose that's what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn't want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it's a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
I don't make it a habit to check, but it has been fun to check and call out in precisely two scenarios.
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One user and I deep into a sub thread on a multiple day old post arguing about ettiquette here. Was weird to get multiple downvotes on those sorts of comments. They were using their "abandoned" alts.
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Another thread where I had repeatedly asked someone to share the source for their claim despite them insisting that I just wasn't googling right. I offered them to edit literally every comment (multiple thousand) on this account to sing their praises. Downvoted with no response.
If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.
Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.
also don't do this because fuck that
It's to guard against bot accounts. I'd much rather have that instead of the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there's clearly artificial voting going on.
It's still not that hard to mess around but I'll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it's sometimes a false positive like in your case.
I agree that it is good with transparency, but then this should also be freely available on the Lemmy platform, and even the clients, in the same way as modlogs list what is going on.
I knew that admins could somehow go into the database and check who has done what, but I assumed that this was only the admin, and maybe even that the info was encrypted. It's alright with me that it's not, but then why not display it on each post and comment, with a list of interactions to it.
In this case, it's this post:
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088
Although, the comment where people were being called out, may have been removed (not sure if it's because I have blocked the user, or they have blocked me)
I fully agree it should be transparent instead of a kind of trick you learn eventually. Won't happen anytime soon though, the Lemmy devs are against the notion. They actually block lemvotes on their instance which is a bit ironic because they insta ban people for down voting a lot from what I understand.
Community moderators can also directly see who upvotes or downvotes posts and comments on their community.
It's not just through lemvotes.
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Because ignorance is strength
It's pretty helpful sometimes when you can see who is brigading and where the majority of downvotes come from. Allows communities to better police themselves.
The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It's why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
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As other comments have said its by design. But there is a quirk if they used lemvotes to determine who the down voters were: it doesn't seem to pick up downvotes by mbin users. For example, according to lemvotes I’ve never downvoted anything. This is demonstrably false :)
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