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Fundamental problems with private voting Question Features poll (piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
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Several months ago I have PieFed users the option to vote privately, where an alt/sockpuppet account automatically votes on their behalf. Since then I've been watching to see how it turned out.

  • Finding bigots who upvote transphobia (etc) is harder. To work around this, piefed shares the real vote with trusted instances, BUT:
  • trusted instances Announce votes using the primary to untrusted instances, so the privacy doesn't work most of the time
  • Maintaining a list of trusted instances is a pain in the ass.
  • People always ask why their instance isn't trusted
  • Figuring out who the primary account is, could be quite easy if you have technical skills and a little knowledge of how ActivityPub works. It's not truly 100% private.

Plus, cases of admins/mods abusing their knowledge of who downvoted them have been very rare, lately. This removes most of the reason for private voting in the first place.

I'm starting to feel like private voting is not working and can't really be made to work. Thoughts?

63% Get rid of private voting
14% Keep private voting and make no changes
23% Keep private voting and try harder to make it work
35 votes - ended 1 year ago
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

Private messages are also public. These are not virtues of the protocol, they are shortcomings which mean I rarely use it for voting or for direct messages. Which is a shame because I’d like my discussion forum interactions and group chats helping the network effect of the fediverse.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    private messages are not public. they're also not sent out to all other instances. private messages are only seen by the sender's instance and the recipient's instance.

    the only non-private part about them is that someone with access to the instance database can extract them, but that isn't any different from a non-federated platform. the only way to mitigate that is by ensuring strong e2ee that isn't managed by the platform, where the keys are only available to the user.

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