Yes, that is why I am arguing in favor of an additional layer of pseudonymous voting.

But not my votes.

For starters datamining my voting patterns for building a deeper interest profile. It should be pretty obvious how this works in terms of user fingerprinting, and the ultimate monetization of Lemmy data. It would be super naive to think that Lemmy will be the one web space immune to this kind of thing. I guarantee you meta already has an army of silent instances doing this.

Worst case scenario, legit state actors use it to target deanonymization attacks at dissidents. I would not be shocked if the …usual suspects… Are engaged in this kind of thing.

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.

Western alliances which are the only places in the world with a robust LGBT rights framework?

“Nooooo you can’t just give people rights because it makes you look good!”

They openly state that their primarily goals in federation is to be obnoxious trolls, and boy howdy do they put a lot of energy into it. They are first and foremost, just obnoxious. It’s like 20% teenagers going through their edgy anti establishment phase, and then the rest are right wing, Russian, and Chinese trolls playing soggy waffle with each other. They pretend to be super serious about LGBT issues but then simp for Hamas, Iran and Russia. And one of their tankie leaders just got caught calling trans issues “western pink washing.”

It’s just a mess. It’s probably a bit overblown, but the community is legitimately annoying if nothing else.

It is extremely obvious that the .ml admins run a malicious version of the Lemmy code which gives them additional levers of control. This alone makes them a serious threat to the entire fediverse.

Imagine that - a white dude who appropriates the moniker of an actual slave revolutionary as a symbol for his “cause” might be cringe and unhinged.

This is actually more evidence that the Lemmy devs run a modified version of the code which gives them the ability to, eg do things like dole out mass community bans. There is also some evidence that they selectively federate the mod log as well. It all points to the obvious conclusion that these people can and will abuse their power in any way they can.

That’s the most frustrating part. These “leftists” are the stupid kind who seem to care more about relitigating idiotic cold war drama than evolving or pushing forward leftist philosophy. It’s straight up brain rot, mixed with obvious right wing agitprop disguised as leftist ideology. That fact that anyone other than trolls, spies and teenagers would engage with it is astounding.

People are naive if they think the .ml admins and devs don’t intend to keep their thumb on the Lemmy scale. More instances need to take this threat seriously and defederate from .ml, and possibly even fork the Lemmy repos for when the devs inevitably decide they want to start building quiet exploits into the code. There are serious cyber security implications here that people are sleeping on