I have been working on Lemvotes, a tool to check who voted on a Lemmy post. In this blog post, I will describe how it works and the ethics of such a tool.
That’s reassuring to know. What I don’t understand is why you have the /api/v3/post/like/list route. You say you don’t want votes to be snooped on, but then you add an endpoint that makes it very easy for instance admins to do exactly that if they choose to? Also worth pointing out that the tool linked here wouldn’t work in its current form if this route didn’t exist.
Read the issue above for why. Vote manipulation is a real problem, but making all votes public is not the solution anyone wants. Limiting vote viewing to admins and mods is decided on as the best of both worlds.
Also that tool can only be used by specifically malicious instances whose goal it is to snoop and expose all votes. Those instances can and should be blocked.
This is for admins to see easier vote manipulation. I think mods can see that on their communities too.
For admins its like… they could literally just look into the database, so it doesnt make any difference. Mods in the other hand should rather not snoop around i guess.
This tool just simplifies the process instead of creating an open federated instance yourself and see the votes.
I want to remind everyone that since users overwhelmingly don’t want their votes snooped on (for good reason), we will never add anything like this inside lemmy, lemmy-ui, or jerboa.
While there’s nothing we can do to snoopers making tools like this, it requires a lemmy server admin login.
If you know of servers which are giving admin access to this tool, let us know, so we can add it to our blocklist.
That’s reassuring to know. What I don’t understand is why you have the
/api/v3/post/like/listroute. You say you don’t want votes to be snooped on, but then you add an endpoint that makes it very easy for instance admins to do exactly that if they choose to? Also worth pointing out that the tool linked here wouldn’t work in its current form if this route didn’t exist.Read the issue above for why. Vote manipulation is a real problem, but making all votes public is not the solution anyone wants. Limiting vote viewing to admins and mods is decided on as the best of both worlds.
Also that tool can only be used by specifically malicious instances whose goal it is to snoop and expose all votes. Those instances can and should be blocked.
This is for admins to see easier vote manipulation. I think mods can see that on their communities too.
For admins its like… they could literally just look into the database, so it doesnt make any difference. Mods in the other hand should rather not snoop around i guess.
This tool just simplifies the process instead of creating an open federated instance yourself and see the votes.
Maybe federation should be based on allowlisting, instead of allowing instances by default.