Private votes are just normal votes except without the federation. So their effect is only felt on the local instance.
Comment on What is piefed?
Aqarius@lemmy.world 2 days agoHow exactly does the private vote thing work? I thought votes being federated was inherent to the way the fediverse is designed.
rimu@piefed.social 1 day ago
howrar@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I believe piefed creates fake accounts to do the voting so it doesn’t federate the actual account that cast the vote.
rimu@piefed.social 1 day ago
That's how it used to work but I got rid of it because there were too many unintended side-effects. Now a private vote is just one that is not federated.
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
What were the side-effects? I was thinking of implementing something that doesn’t directly federate votes, so it would be good to know what problems I’d need to solve before that can be done.
rimu@piefed.social 1 day ago
Some admins really love watching who votes for what and banning people based on that.
You can disagree with that if you like but if it means they get pissed enough to defederate your whole instance, you lose.
If your instance is just you and a handful of others, no one will notice or care. But once you have 1000 users the amount of anonymous votes will be noticed and there will be consequences. Maybe not defederation but everyone banned for upvoting bigoted content will migrate to your instance and you'll be hosting the biggest shitbirds around.
I don't see a solution to this. As long as lemmy and mbin let admins snoop on people's votes that will be the dynamic and PieFed puts itself at a disadvantage by doing anything different.