If you’re wtf-ing about votes being public, it’s an inherent and necessary part of federation, since there’s no central instance that counts votes and decides the score, each instance needs to add them up - and if each instance doesn’t receive the full list of voters, there’s no way to stop an instance from completely lying about vote counts (they would need to create fake users to attribute the votes to, or attribute fake votes to real users they have)
I guess my only question is: what keeps someone from creating databases of who responds this way or that to this or that category or topic?
Reddit and some others were just accused of handing over to DHS the information of users who had been critical of ICE. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say (but I wouldn’t be surprised). Can I gather from what you’ve said that the DHS, or anyone really, has direct access to that information on the Fediverse and could create that database after an afternoon with ChatGPT?
Nothing stops anyone from doing that - the fediverse does not claim to be a private platform and anything you post or interact with should be assumed to be public
If you’re wtf-ing about votes being public, it’s an inherent and necessary part of federation, since there’s no central instance that counts votes and decides the score, each instance needs to add them up - and if each instance doesn’t receive the full list of voters, there’s no way to stop an instance from completely lying about vote counts (they would need to create fake users to attribute the votes to, or attribute fake votes to real users they have)
Thanks for the explanation.
I guess my only question is: what keeps someone from creating databases of who responds this way or that to this or that category or topic?
Reddit and some others were just accused of handing over to DHS the information of users who had been critical of ICE. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say (but I wouldn’t be surprised). Can I gather from what you’ve said that the DHS, or anyone really, has direct access to that information on the Fediverse and could create that database after an afternoon with ChatGPT?
Nothing stops anyone from doing that - the fediverse does not claim to be a private platform and anything you post or interact with should be assumed to be public