I constantly misvote by doing a gesture not exactly right on my phone. I wouldn't judge anyone by their votes.

Someone can spin up an instance and have votes federated to them anyway, so regardless of whether lemvotes exists or not, people can harvest your information.

just upvote and downvote a bunch of random things then your profile has been salted.

Which is why you shouldn't put all your interests in one account.

Have one account for memes and shitposts, then another for bringing down the patriarchy and kinky stuff. OK, so maybe 3 accounts

i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything!

So don't interact. What you read isn't stored, but if you interact, it should be public.

For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone.

I agree that it's dumb you don't have a "my votes" page where you can remove that. But you can go to said post and just remove your vote.

Piefed alleviates some of these issues.

To be 1000% clear, the voting agents on piefed worked just fine. They scrapped it because of forum politics. A few terminally online admins got real mad they couldn't stalk user votes and threatened to defederate, even though they could easily just ban the voting agents if they wanted. They made up a completely absurd and roundabout premise that they needed to be able to preemptively ban people based on votes in case they might make a "harmful comment" in the future. The fact that this was the primary concern indicates that the functionality worked as intended.

Hopefully someone integrates the same functionality into an app. Honestly I'd take a swing at it if I had a bit more time.

Assume that everything you say and do online is public, unless explicitly stated (and proven) otherwise. The advantage of Lemmy (and Reddit in principle) is that your account is anonymous, it is not linked to your person. So you have some freedom to be who you want to be without repurcussions in your daily life.

If it would be encrypted, it would open up for vote manipulation. There are plans that mods will see who upvotes in their communities. Create multiple accounts on different instances if you need more privacy, separate personalities for different topics.

I don't think it really matters, just don't dox yourself and you should be fine.
Also you can have multiple accounts on different instances and stuff if you want.
And I don't think you can tell that much by just upvotes and downvotes. I often times downvote stuff I've seen re-posted too much in different instances. I don't want to see the same thing dozens of times ofc, doesn't mean I necessarily have an issue with the content.
Lastly I bet most people don't use that website anyway. I don't. What good does it do me to see who downvotes me? If we disagree on something... that's allowed.

Fiddled around a bit and found a setting for that, or so it seems, gotta go collect some downvotes to try it out 😁

Thanks!

Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.

I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don't miss it. I think it took me about a week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.

If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I'll report it.

I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don't know how it is with other software.

Hmm I'm not sure if it affects local.

Because they're basically the same as a post or comment, it's how the fediverse works. They get sent out to anyone listening, and whoever is listening directs it where to go i.e. a community or users inbox. So all instances can update with a new post to their users who are subbed. In theory the DM would get ignored by everyone else who isn't the target, but one could easily set it up to not do so.

Exactly.

But if Lemmy was just seen as a federated message board, it wouldn't have nearly the users that it does. It's popularity rocketed (compared to the rest of the Fediverse) specifically because it takes so much of it's style from Reddit.

it comes up as an option when you click on the "..." of a post