How does this work with moderation? I.e. what happens if I ban the real user from a Lemmy instance? What if I ban the alternate user?
Also, what happens if on Piefed, a user votes for something, then they change the setting and then they vote for the same thing again? How would a Lemmy instance know if it should count the vote or not, since the original user didn't actually vote from Lemmy's point of view?
Hmm it's an interesting way to handle it but it should be easy to correlate users and the voting profile by just examining voting patterns. It doesn't really fix it entirely I would say.
I’m just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.
And I'm just trying to explain that there is no privacy to remove cause there was never any privacy to begin with. Hiding votes in the Lemmy UI is bad because it makes users think that the votes are private, when in fact they are public.
If there was a way to make them private, I would say we should go for that solution. But there currently is not any way for them to be private and I say we should not pretend that they are private when they are in fact not.
I don't actually think that would ruin the platform as much as you say - nearly all other ActivityPub platforms have public votes and they still exist so I'm not sure the argument really holds.
You are not missing anything. They just aren't shown in the Lemmy UI
You are exactly right - the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) has no concept of private votes. Making them private would only hide them in Lemmy's UI, but still make them accessible to other users using other apps.
theoretically accessible via workarounds
It is not "theoretically accessible via workarounds", it is plain and simple there on other platforms and easy to access. See, here's the votes for your first comment, it even shows the downvotes. I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the "Activity" field in the menu.
It’s not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.
As an aside, I do think it is actually illegal to get all that information you mention without your consent, so your premise kinda doesn't work. Also, none of that stuff is stored on Lemmy's database so of course that stuff is not public, how would Lemmy even share it?
I mean yeah, but you could already do that now
Yes, but because the votes are not private, I can be found out by correlating votes. Like if I made another account and just used it to always upvote everything my first account posts, that would be pretty obvious. If votes are private, there is no way to find out such conduct.
You're misunderstanding what the developers are asking here.
Votes are public in the underlying protocol. There is nothing Lemmy can do against that. Lemmy currently doesn't show the votes, despite the fact that they are public. However, other ActivityPub implementations, for instance Mbin, do show the votes. So the votes are only slightly more complicated to get but not really private at all.
With that in mind, the devs are asking: Should the votes continue to only be shown to mods and admins or should everyone see them? Considering the fact that all users on other implementations see votes anyway. They are not asking your opinion because they want to implement changes to make votes more private than they are right now - that is not up to Lemmy to decide. That would require a change in ActivityPub, which would be a lot more complicated and it's not certain that it would ever happen.
there are certainly ways to solve it, like having the vote identity split between multiple servers that can still confirm with each other that the vote is valid, but neither would reveal the actual identity to make it traceable back.
This doesn't solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
The only way to solve it would be to actually verify that each account is associated with 1 real life person and then verify that each person only votes once on each post. But that requires essentially verifying a passport and documents for each user which is totally infeasible and has far worse privacy concerns than public votes do.
Please realize that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I'm a little concerned about the precedent this sets. An instance could use this technique to facilitate anonymous commenting or posting in addition to votes.