Yes, and this would be fairly easy to make them at least pseudonymous without even needing to modify activitypub itself.

That said, I still don't support anything which lowers the friction of vote stalking like exposing votes in even more places. Technically people can look up my address from my license plate number if they really care to, but that doesn't mean I want to list it in bold letters on my windshield.

Overall my opinion is irrelevant, however, I think there is a huge difference in knowing a person votes vs how a person votes. The how should not be public, imo.

I think votes shouldn't be anonymous. Transparency is important to weed out trolls and bots. And public votes should be made easier accessible to every user not only admins/mods.

How do mods see them? As far as I am aware, you have to be an instance admin. But it's not difficult or time consuming to spin one up and I doubt the average user of Lemmy is technically incapable; most of the Fediverse users in general seem to be IT people and developers.

Yes, they should ideally. But it's hard to properly implement them in a way that will guarantee anonymity and be sybil-resistant at the same time.

The only fair way to handle this is for all admins to immediately turn over all passwords to the Crumbgrabber, who will act as an interface between the government and private sector interests in determining the value of each Lemmy user, and whether they are a fit candidate for the mobile infantry. Remember- only service guarantees citizenship.

I typically operate under the assumption that basically anything I decide to post on a public forum is not private.

Call me crazy, but I care less about the instance admins being able to see my vote history than regular users. For me the latter will produce a chilling effect on how I operate with the site moreso than the former, even if admins have more power that can be abused. I was already aware of the votes not actually being public and the idea admins could see that info seemed to be a given, but I still think there's a difference between having a motivated malicious user go out of their way to look (making an instance, looking on a different platform, etc) vs making it simple for lay users to see that info within the platform itself (which I what I think is under discussion, currently).

And honestly, if a solution could be determined to help make votes anonymous but still allow admins/mods to deal with bots/trolls, then I'd be all for it.

If votes became truly public, what would stop a malicious user from automating crawling the fediverse to get a list of every up and down vote a targeted user has ever made? Admins can currently do this, I assume given enough time and intent? Yuck.

I really hope a solution is found and if Lemmy goes the way of truly public votes, it would probably turn this into a nonparticipatory medium for me, I'd still read posts but not vote or comment.

Edit: also, most casual Lemmy users aren't aware of public votes and would be upset that it already works this way, and only particularly invested or curious users are even reading this thread.

Other posts have already posted it better than I could, but my tl;dr is: one of the good things about Lemmy compared to the "competition" is that votes are public -- or at least the fact that someone voted is.

I wouldn't mind restricting access to how a user voted, in particular if in the future something like multi-choice upvotes becomes a thing, or even something I'd love to see as is dual-voting ("I downvoted because I don't like it but I upvoted it because you are absolutely right about it", this is absolutely different than not voting at all if the who is voting is being tracked).

But on a fundamental level, in the least instance admins have to be able to know who votes for our version of the system to even work compared to the competition.

I’d rather keep the status quo. While I realize that the vote visibility can play into the hands of mod/admin/instance owners with nefarious or petty vengeful purposes, we also can see who bad actors are in the vote system - iow a bot or person perpetually downvoting subjects they disagree with yet not participating.

But people need to be aware that the votes are not private.

We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.

Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.

No perfect solution.

Don’t know how that would be implemented, but someone needs to watch the watchers.

Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.

If I vote something I'm expressing my opinion just like I would with comment, and those are not anonymous.
I get that people are worried about griefers and psychos, but anonymity is just a (poor) cure for the symptoms, not for the disease; users who don't behave should be banned, and if their instance turns out to be a detriment to the community, they should be defederated.

The anonymity we should ensure is the one of the person behind the username, to avoid doxxing and cyber-bullying.