I could be wrong, but I interpret this post as being about Mastodon’s culture of being against search technology, which I find depressing and irritating for reasons I explained in that other thread as well as this one.

However, I just noticed a place where there is some lack of informed consent here on Lemmy: in the Lemmy UI, it appears that upvotes and downvotes are anonymous. I checked a long time ago, and realized that they weren’t really; the identity of the up or down voter is federated, but it is simply not shown by the UI.

I would assume that many (probably most) lemmy users do not realize this: admins of your own instance and all federated instances have the ability to see who upvoted and downvoted what.

It just now came to my attention that Friendica actually is showing this information publicly, in the form of “$username does not like this” for a downvote! https://rytter.me/display/4c906314-4763-d3aa-4584-11a516756414 🤣

(hey @OptimusPrime@lemmy.ml … why did you downvote that? I myself am also listed there as not liking it; I downvoted it as a test to confirm my assumption that it would show up as “does not like”, and then when I undownvoted it that event apparently didn’t get federated.)

imo these are the kind of “informed consent” issues that fediverse developers should be thinking about, rather than “how can we increase the power imbalance by making it so that only the elite are allowed to have fulltext search… in the name of justice” as so many seem to be hell-bent on doing.

i clicked a button that most lemmy users would assume is an anonymous up/down vote and now my name is listed on a 3rd party website saying i “don’t like” something (even though I tried to undo it). #thisisfine ?