Absolutely braindead consideration by the devs. I'll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.

Maybe a model where upvotes and downvotes can per instance be federated either publicly or aggregated? So an instance admin could choose to bundle together the vote totals and push them to other instances and it would just show the total number of votes on comments and posts by people on their server rather than the individuals. And if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.

I thought they were already???

Like how/why wouldn’t they be public? Even if the data isn’t readily accessible via a gui it’s gotta be somewhere so that federation works. Unless you’ve been thirsty in your main it shouldn’t be a problem?

Am I missing something?

Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features

I'm down for more transparency. Lets make them public!

I just hope my app hides them

So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance's hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.

What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you're accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: "The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?"

Personally: In many ways I don't mind. I'm on the internet with my real name. I don't mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn't change my behaviour.