Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.
Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?
Could be hashed and salted, with a random salt.
The trouble is, then, that it’s harder to disallow users from voting multiple times if the voting user isn’t on the post’s home instance.
Couldn’t someone vote multiple times anyway by just having a bunch of different accounts?
Yes, true, the current system does allow that. But the current system also doesn’t allow users to accidentally vote twice (and it remembers your vote)— this is the feature I think would be more challenging to implement if we were to hash & salt the user’s ID.
That’s always been a problem on Reddit and is on Lemmy now too though
You could make the salt determined (pseudorandomly) by the username and the content id.