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.
I mean essentially any decentralised type of social Media cannot work any other way. An open backend is not shocking, it is expected.
To those of use who understand how it works, yes. Five minutes in Lemmy support makes it obvious that there are many people who DON’T understand how it works. Hence, YSK.
That’s not true, it’s just very computationally expensive to make it secure and private. There are cryptographic solutions these problems.
So no known user will ever have a desire to join. Malicious actors will dig out their votes and expose it publicly. Could be massively damaging. You cannot do that with other social media. Obviously those companies have that information, but they do not share it.
They could just make an account that’s not identifiable? Or only use their identifiable account sparingly. Or not have their upvotes be publicly damaging.