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.
Well, I am not a developer in this field, so I don’t know what’s possible, and what’s not. All I know is that this needs to be fixed one way or another, or this whole platform will fail. If our information is all available publicly, we will be better off just using Facebook/Reddit/Twitter - at least these platforms don’t leave our data out in public view. We need to stop saying what’s not possible, and instead talk about what is possible.
Maybe there is a way to keep you votes hidden but there sure is no way to keep your posts hidden. The whole point of federation is to distribute your post to the other instances. You want eat your cake and have it too. You want to post publicly but stay in control of the message. You are not better off using BigTech because there someone can scrape your data as well. And you don’t even know to how many parties your data is sent without your knowledge. There is no privacy in social media.
I am not talking about the posts. Of course those are public, as they should. There’s a big difference between data I willingly put out vs. metadata and the likes.