As it was recently discussed a lot of the data you generate while using the fediverse is public. If we’re looking at the threadiverse even more of it is public including your votes.

I only know the specifics of Mastodon and mbin, so maybe @rimu@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @julian@community.nodebb.org and other devs can chime in here.

Voting on Mastodon is a lot more private than voting in the threadiverse. Only the author of a post (and their instance) knows everyone who voted on a post. Everybody else can retrieve the total numbers, but not the individual votes. Of course this comes with the downside that everyone else has to fetch this data and while the instance could send an Update activity - informing other instances that the numbers changed - Mastodon currently does not do that.
In the threadiverse on the other hand, every single vote gets send around the network, including all the details.

I would like the threadiverse software to get a bit better at privacy. Mastodon is often restrictive with activities for that exact reason and while I do not want to completely screw visibility by not sending anything to anyone, I think the visibility of votes can be improved a lot.

So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. The magazine then announces this Update activity to all its subscribers. The post object has to contain the relevant numbers of course and Mastodon and PeerTube use shares, likes and dislikes (PeerTube only). These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted, that would defeat the purpose (looking at you PeerTube)

Because nobody wants to break federation with other software, it would be nice if this could be coordinated between all the threadiverse actors

  • julian@activitypub.space
    5·
    2 days ago

    > @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de said in A more private way to distribute votes: > > So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to.

    My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.

    The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.

    Fwiw when someone upvotes on NodeBB, it gets blasted everywhere too!

    I would recommend that votes continue to be sent to group actors, who then decide whether to announce it (old behaviour) or keep quiet and wait for the update before announcing (new behaviour).

    It would mean vote synchronization would be less reliable however.

    Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social’s vote batching proposal.

    • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.deOP
      1·
      1 day ago

      My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.

      The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.

      That is true. It could of course be changed to send it to only the group instead of the author 🤔

      Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social 's vote batching proposal.

      Can you link me to it. Seems that I missed that