• infeeeee@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    Afaik on lemmy only your host instance knows what you upvote/downvote, instances just sync the number of upvotes, not the users who voted. So they cannot analyze that, even if they spin up a their own lemmy instance l was wrong, see reply

    Comments are 100% public though, that’s true

    • Votes federate, but only for communities followed. I won’t see your votes in a community that I don’t follow, but I can see when you upvoted or downvoted what post in the community.

      A scraper could simply follow every community on a Lemmy server and, barring Lemmy performance issues, will receive all comments and votes.

      Just a quick and dirty SQL query of which votes of yours are in my server’s database:

      select comment_like.score as score,comment_like.published as when, person.actor_id as who, comment.ap_id as what from comment_like join person on person.id = comment_like.person_id join comment on comment.id = comment_like.comment_id where person.actor_id = 'https://lemmy.ml/u/GolfNovemberUniform' order by comment_like.published desc; 
      

      The same info is also available for posts, of course, I just didn’t want to bother making the query any longer.

      Server admins/mods on Lemmy also have a button to see who upvoted and downvoted each post. This is just the inverse of that.

      • infeeeee@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        I see, so all instance admins can see that theoretically, but regular users can’t. I don’t remember where I read what I wrote, can’t find it now.

        It’s a bit misleading that lemmy developers themself call votes “essentially anonymous” like in this issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4088

        With this in mind I will go back to upvote memes with my other accounts, and switch between them more regularly.