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.
Uh…duh? Why would you think this info wouldn’t be available to admins and also…who cares?
My perspective is that most people are not going to realize that this visibility extends to ANY admin of ANY instance in the fediverse, not just the admin of their own servers.
There’s zero cost of entry in setting up an instance. Anybody in the world can become one is a matter of minutes.
But we’re back to who cares? Why are you so concerned with people seeing what you’ve voted on an anonymous social media platform?
If you are that concerned with privacy that worthless data on your anonymous account troubled you, then posting to public social media doesn’t make much sense.
So if Threads federates to this. It slurps everything. That is very concerning. Most are trying to get away from big tech for privacy reasons.
There is no good reason to share who upvotes a post to another instance. It should be anonymous to anyone other than the original instance.
if theres a way to link your username to an email address, Meta could, for example, create an instance and scrape all that info and attach to your shadow profile, and depending what kind of things you upvote, they could infer your political opinions, sexual preference, location, hobbies, etc.
This circles back to if you are that concerned about privacy
Its seeming like a lot of people want privacy but aren’t willing to take even basic steps to protect their own privacy, instead wanting someone else to do it for them.
I don’t and you don’t. The hard right-winger who thinks they’re “anonymously” upvoting pro-LGBTQ+ posts, might.
That depends on your username and whether you provided an email address. People should be aware of this.