Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    While there is an enormous amount of possible passwords, there is only a limited (and quite small) amount of users. Couldn’t you just hash all the usernames one by one and map the hashes to the usernames? So you could still reverse engineer the usernames of those who voted on a post.

    Edit: Salting with the post id would make this attacking process harder, but still realistic. Probably the only real solution is to hide the votes table from federated instances, I’m not sure if that brings technical problems.

    • @dukkEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      That was what I was implying, yes.

      Just hash each username and store it. Then just check the usernames hash to see if it matches.

        • @dukkEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Actually, you’re not really wrong.

          All the more reason to give out limited data to all other instances. Why do these instances really need this data? Mastodon doesn’t need it, not quite sure why Lemmy does it.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•1 year ago

            Yeah I don’t understand why every instance can’t keep track of their own votes privately. Sure, voting manipulation is a thing, but it’s possible regardless.

            Honestly I really hope Lemmy does something to address this issue. Otherwise it’s kind of a dealbreaker for me.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      If anything, wouldn’t that make vote abuse even easier? Just send 100 upvotes with 100 random hashes.