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The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism… And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don’t really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.
I’m all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it’ll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.
What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you’ll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.
You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it’ll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.
As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.
It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it’s worthwhile to share from one person, it’s worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn’t all that important.