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.
So this is interesting… I thought only kbin visualized voting. Does this mean Lemmy’s users are also tracked on kbin?
Yes. But Kbin is actually doing the right thing by disclosing the votes since any instance admin would be able to see them anyways.
kbin doesn’t allow downvotes, right? I think the potential issue here is people figuring out who downvotes them then proceed to harrass the downvoters. Maybe lemmy should just store the cryptographic signature of the downvoter, which should be enough for the system to verify the action’s validity, and skip storing the actual username.
I would hope that anyone doing so would be dealt with by moderators.
Kbin allows downvotes, they’re just called “reduces”.
I’m no expert but I believe comments are pulled down by an instance when a user requests the information and is then cached in the DB. So not everything is, but content that’s viewed by a user on the instance will be.