maegul

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?

They’ve been defederated from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear for much longer though.

They're not defederated from lemmy.ml

I’m not sure what your point here regarding Beehaw is though.

That they're defederated from lemmy.world, a centrist/mainstream/reddit-like whatever instance, which plenty of others have trouble with too, indicating things aren't as simple as "left instances are trouble".

What right-wing-ish instances are we talking about?

It's apparently historical, so prob 2020 or so.

“Demanding open source users” is a nice way of framing community demands negatively. lol

Well it can cut both ways I think. That open source burn out is real and that open source has attained a strangely consumerist culture is real. If you're not aware you may not be plugged in enough. That of course is no excuse to neglect your community, I'd likely agree with you that the lemmy devs could do significantly better on that front. I think I've even seen them admit as much.

While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.

For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it's the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome ... when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don't really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I've gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.

Point being that it's all probably a bit of a mess that doesn't neatly align with left v right.

I'd bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don't like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I've come to understand over time actually).

Oh, I was more talking about the technicalities of doing anything that might become desirable once votes are public, such as opting-in to having your votes hidden or having a particular post’s votes hidden or whatever else may come out in response.

I think the best way to think about this is in terms of "affordances" of the platform and the balance of their merits. "Affordances" just mean the actions and behaviours enabled by the platform's features (a jargon-y but useful word I've seen others use in these discussions).

Broader principles like privacy are important too, but I think can easily lead to less productive and relevant discussions, in part because many of the counters or complications will come down to the actual affordances.

The biggest affordance is obvious: more polarisation & abusive/antagonistic behaviour

From what I've read so far, I think everyone shares a pretty clear understanding of what public votes will lead to ... a more heated and polarising dynamic, with potential abuse vectors opening up, and less honesty and openness in voting. And I think most share a distaste for that scenario. Either way, I do, and I'd encourage others to think about how it's likely result of public votes and with the internet being the internet, is unlikely to be pleasant or fruitful.

Specific people having access doesn't decide the matter

While others have access to vote data, namely admins of instances, mods (for their communities) and members of platforms that make votes public like k/mbin, I don't think this is decisive.

It's about the behaviours that are being enabled and the balance of behaviours and how they interact to form community dynamics, with the fediverse itself being an important factor. An admin or mod having access to votes is part of making their job easier, which is a good thing. It's power and responsibility. And the moment they violate the bounds of their role by "doxing" someone's voting data, that'd obviously be a bad thing, but with countermeasures we can take. We can leave their instance or community and our instance can defederate from them ... their account can be blocked and possibly banned by admins. On balance, this seems stable and fair enough to me.

In the case of other platforms, like k/mbin, that's definitely more tricky. But again, defederation is always a possibility here if it becomes problematic enough (however dramatic that could end up). This is just the nature of the fediverse, that platforms will differ on things like this. Again, if people start abusing that information from other platforms and instances, blocking, banning are options, as is the nuclear option of defederation with any such instances (which is a core balancing feature of the fediverse).

As it presently stands, k/mbin are a minority of users on the threadiverse and so whatever their platform choices are don't really affect the rest of the threadiverse.

In the end, you can only make the best platform that you can. That k/mbin do something we don't want to do isn't a good reason for following suite. If anything, it's a good reason to stick with what we prefer and continue to make the argument with them on their choices.

Privacy and transparency are relevant but not decisive

I agree it's an issue that it seems votes are private when they aren't. Again, I come back to the balance of affordances, and I think they're better as they are than with public votes. However misleading the privacy situation is, it can be handled by being more transparent with users by providing warnings etc.

Ultimately, the privacy problem on the fediverse is not going away any time soon ... it's the nature of decentralisation, and this should maybe be made more clear to more people! But making a better platform is a real problem in front of us right now and I think it's better to focus on that than how the general issue of privacy or consistency with privacy is best served.

Other platforms aren't that relevant

I think I saw someone mentioning in the GitHub dicussion that other platforms expose vote data. While true, many of those would be microblogging platforms (mastodon, twitter, bluesky etc), where, again, the balance of affordances becomes relevant. A "vote" there, normally called a "like" is a personal action between user accounts that are likely to follow each other with such being the core mechanic of the platform. On aggregators like lemmy/reddit, the core mechanic is making popular posts so that your content gets to the top of the feed (roughly anyway). While there's a lot of overlap, there's more angst here around what gets voted on and what doesn't and less inter-personal accountability and bonding. Posts and discussions are more public affairs and less conversations between people.

Technical can of worms

I wonder if making votes public would create the need or desire for enabling more post-specific options for users, such as making a post that can't be voted on or that doesn't provide public voting data?

What about the children!!

In the end, my bet would be that at the scale that lemmy is at, it won't make too much of a difference if votes were made public. I think some would definitely encounter more unpleasantness and some would definitely find voting a more stressful affair, but we're cosy enough that we'll cope. Going forward though, public voting for an aggregator feels dangerous and hard to undo. Yes, it could be technically removed, but if a culture is established that is accustomed to it and become desensitised to the negatives, they'll probably want to hold on to it.

Jerry ... admin of many instances!

the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy

Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here ... it's been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).

So ... can we like finally dismiss Google Chrome as the obviously awful idea it is and which should never have made it this far and remind all of the web devs married to it that they're doing bad things and are the reason why we can't have nice things?

Hmmm ... a web browser owned by a monopolistic advertising company ... how could that possibly go wrong??!!

• XKCD: Infrastructures

Very much appreciate that you did this (and this follow up too)!!

But lunduke is a fairly known entity by now I think. I recall many getting weird about him and his business-y linux persona shtick even before the transphobia stuff started. So while it's completely fair to give Melroy a chance, providing a helping hand on mastodon almost just speaks for itself.

And I'm not even saying that mbin necessarily should "die" because of this, just that it likely reflects an attitude that will not work well on the fedi over time, and probably justifiably so.

Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.

Yes. Even more, any administration (and frankly community mod team too) needs to have backups in place from the start. Or at least very early.

It's not hard. Find someone willing to be a co-admin or mod. If you can't do that ... then you're not actually in a position to be an admin (or even a mod).

I think community portability is a way bigger deal, at least here

Very true. And the aliases/mirrors idea might work well. Where content doesn't have to be moved or the addressing problem fixed, instead people can just change their subscription and the mirror community have the ability to treat itself as the primary (and not a mirror). This feels viable to me!

Well that is certainly relevant news! And sad to see too.

So long for the kbin family of platforms then (seriously, harsh to say, but so long as this is representative, I reckon that spells the end of it on the fediverse).

Nope. Given what povoq says above, it seems it’s not public yet?