That’s what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can’t tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can’t be completely sure).
Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user’s other identities.
I think this approach kinda fixes that issue though, no? You can use it the way it is now, and others can be anonymous.
I mean it would be also nice if you could log into multiple accounts and easily switch between them for each vote and comment, but this is also good, IMO.
Looks like it’s kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it’s a bitch without an API.
What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.
Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.
I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don’t think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.
And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their “main” account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).
That’s technically true, but the apps “everyone” has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don’t really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it’s a shitty experience.
It’s very easy to find my IRL identity, and even my online pseudonym (well, both of them) have so much stuff tied to them that they are effectively my real identities. They are very much public, and definitely not anonymous.
…to be fair browsers don’t really make sense for streaming, but you could call it “future proofing”.
I don’t think dual boot has ever been a good solution (unless you also run one or both of the OS’s under the other in a VM).
Like, if you are unsure about linux, trying it out, learning, whatever, you can just boot a live"cd", or maybe install it on an external (flash) drive.
If you are kinda sure you want to switch, just nuke Windows; it’s easier to switch that way than to have everything on two systems, having to switch.
This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
That’s not how it works. It just means the company owns the code for all intents and purposes, which also means that if they tell you that you can release it under a FOSS license / contribute to someone else’s project, you can absolutely do that (they effectively grant you the license to use “their” code that you wrote under a FOSS license somewhere else).
Mass vote manipulation should still be easy to spot. It’ll only be hard to check whether the account voting is a real person.
Thanks for being so upfront about how you run your instance. I think it’s disingenuous when people claim that there is “no agenda” or “no moderation” or whatever, because there is always some - even if unintended - just by the pure nature of people running it. So being explicit and opinionated about it is great.
…and it still doesn’t solve the issue that literally anyone can run their own instance and just capture the data.
On one end, if it’s my instance and I want to ban a user, I want the whole fucking user banned – not just remove their ability to vote anonymously.
I mean, is that truly the case? If a user only engages in vote manipulation, but otherwise they have insightful comments/posts, is it really that big of a deal that you will ban only their option to vote?
It could be mitigated further by having a different Actor per community you engage in, but that is definitely a bigger change in how voting works currently, and might have issues detecting vote brigading.
When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your “name” (or alternatively you switch to a “burner” account and do it pseudonymously).
But when you vote for stuff it’s often without much thinking, and it’s private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn’t it’s usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.
What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?
There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.
To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.
That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
AGPL, to prevent streaming (while not sharing the code).
This doesn’t solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
I mean yeah, but you could already do that now. The point is to not make it worse, and to not allow malicious instances to vote as if they were other people.
I guess that’s true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users’ voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don’t comply defederate them.
introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance
It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have “believable” profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just “lurkers” who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it’d be impossible to tell if it’s truly the instance’s users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.
In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.
It wouldn’t really be an issue if you didn’t need an extension for every single basic functionality…
Because of how stupidly opinionated Gnome is I switched to KDE a year or so ago and have been extremely happy with it. And what do you know I don’t even need any extensions, because sane stuff like tray icons are builtin.
I do use an extension for distributing windows in custom areas though, and it didn’t even break throughout the (I believe) 2 large updates there were since I started using it.