this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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It should actually be made more private.
How? The ActivityPub protocol has no support for private votes. Also, private votes would be private for mods and admins as well, which would make downvote brigading and vote manipulation very hard to detect and moderate.
Hmmm ... is it not really possible at all? Just riffing here ... the identity of a voter isn't necessary, just a means to ensure the uniqueness of a voter so there's no duplication etc. So ... could a hash of the voter's ID be distributed with the vote to prevent duplication?
In ActivityPub, no, not at the moment.
How would you verify that such a hash is coming from a real user? What if an instance sends 1000 fake hashes as votes? Also you could still correlate hashes and figure out who is behind the hash by looking at voting patterns of that hash.
What's the difference from users though?
You'd give each user an anonymous vote ID that only the instance can link back to their username.
Imagine you have 500 users that consisently upvote each other and 500 users that vote randomly on different posts. If you jumble up those 500+500 in 1000 random hashes, it becomes impossible to distinguish who is part of the voting ring and who isn't.
Hence why I gave a solution. It would simply become spam that should be handled by the instance where it originates from.
Yea ... that makes sense. Thanks!
Still ... intuitively it feels like if the "threadiverse" platforms weren't so concerned with interoperating with the likes on microblogging platforms, they could come up with a system that involved only sharing total vote numbers from their instance without any idenfifying metadata.
Only sharing aggregate votes could also lead to a lot of issues with vote manipulation, as it is very easy to manipulate such an aggregate.
I agree that ActivityPub is biased around microblogging though. For all its flexibility and universality, it is surprisingly catered to that use case.