Let’s say Dear Leader decides to have the houses of anyone who speaks ill of him (or capitalism) burned down in the night, or their dogs killed, or nefarious files uploaded to their network etc. How easy would that be?
US, of course. I’m actually concerned about this.
There’s no way of knowing. But it would be dumb to assume they aren’t. Fun fact: your subscriptions and up/downvotes aren’t private on lemmy either, due to the nature of how federation works!
More correct to say that Fediverse upvote/downvotes are public.
Whereas on corporate platforms, they are private only to you, the platform, its thousands of ad affiliates, and the government.
Perfectly said, thank you.
Piefed does allow users the option to not federate their votes. So harvesting that data would mean needing local access to the infrastructure or snooping on traffic to/from your local instance.
Shouldn’t be an option. All things should be open and be able to scrape. If every lemmy gets big it would be a good way to identify users manipulating votes or posts.