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.
Sounds like a “non-issue” to me, really. That’s kind of the point with the fediverse. If I run an instance, I have access to its database and, thus, everything stored in it. That was the case with old PHPBB forums, admins could see everything.
The questions is what ends up stored from outside my own instance. I haven’t looked at the source, but I would hazard a guess that it’s mostly some json blobs and/or pointers to users/instances.
I don’t think that’s a non-issue. If you host an instance an can see everything on it, that’s one thing, but if everyone with an instance can see these things from all other instances, that’s a different story. That way literally everyone can see all your up and downvotes. That’s not the end of the world but that’s definitely an issue imo. I can already see people getting canceled not because of an old tweet but because they upvoted something controversial years ago lol.
I’m constantly upvoting/downvoting things on accident on mobile. Something I’d like these mobile apps to implement, is the ability to disable voting so I can avoid this. I’m mainly a lurker having vote history available is a little concerning to me.
It’s not presented as an “issue that needs to be fixed,” rather “an issue you need to be mindful of.”
Read his edit, it’s a bit weird that such a thing even exists. Total sum of up and down votes sure. But according to OP it’s all of it.
I think of PHPBB forums as Lemmy instances. Admins could see everything, but you wouldn’t be able to see what a user upvoted/downvoted on a different PHPBB forum, at least that’s what I gather from everyone talking here.