Due to difficulties making private voting a viable reality , we’ve been playing around with an alternative approach: public/private votes becomes “federated votes” where you can choose whether to send your vote off to other instances or whether it only counts locally and doesn’t get federated.
There are obvious drawbacks to casting a vote that doesn’t federate. But this avoids all the issues with which instances to trust (and who decides that) and avoids the distrust generated by all these sockpuppets with weird names running around and the need to explain in difficult technical detail why we’re doing that, no it’s not vote manipulation, don’t ban / defederate us, etc etc
The video shows how the user interface could work. Basically there is a setting in your profile that determines whether your votes federate and an optional override you can use on a case-by-case basis.
There is an assumption here that people will generally choose one mode (public or private) and stick with that for most of their votes. The popup will only be used rarely so the extra clicks and the waiting involved won’t be much of an issue.
Thoughts?
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This feels like yet-another attempt at making water not wet, but at least it stops from having servers putting out data on the rest of the federation without any accountability.
I think it would be nice if you long press anything of the votes ( vote count, vote buttons ) that the menu comes up.
But other than that its pretty nice already!
Yep sure, why not :)
How interesting! Yeah I personally like it! I think it’s a good way to get around the issue of everyone seeing everyone else’s votes. Because there have been instances of people really going after accounts after a down vote occurs. And it’s a way to honor other instances.
Because there have been instances of people really going after accounts after a down vote occurs
How does this happens?
Federated votes seems like a great idea as it solves both the private/public and good faith/bad faith voting situations👍
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That sounds like a solid solution!
This sounds like a better solution than the current one. I’m not sure about the implementation of manually voting locally or federately, but that’s what testing is for! It might be easiest to embed the options into the 3-dot contextual menu. Or maybe add a new button that brings up a row of new icons/options under the post/comment for extra, lesser used actions. It’s kinda like a contextual menu but it’s a bar of icons that shows more actions. The Boost app does this for comments by clicking on the comment, making the UI hidden and slick, less cluttered until you want to interact with it.
You could also have two numbers, a total of local + federated votes, and a number in parentheses with only local votes.
When I was working on adding voting to lemmy (I never finished it) one of my features I wanted was exactly this. Essentially locking down votes to your instance, meaning you have to have an account in the instance to vote and the votes won’t federate. This would make it so that users of the instance could make decisions without brigading from other instances.
One thing I do beg you to add: 3-2-1 voting and STAR voting. We really need to stop using plurality voting for things.
One thing I do beg you to add: 3-2-1 voting and STAR voting. We really need to stop using plurality voting for things.
Could you explain those?
Just to be clear, this feature doesn’t prevent federated votes coming in from other instances, it just prevents your vote from federating out unless you want it to. So, brigading from other instances could still happen (barring the use of any of the other tools available to a piefed admin).
Piefed (and lemmy I believe) do have options to have a local-only community though. That community is only interactable by local members of that instance, which would prevent the brigading scenario. This is set on a per-community basis though.
Would it make sense to somehow display the breakdown of pub/priv votes (or maybe local/fed votes) instead of just the totals then?
I could see this maybe being useful at a moderator or admin level to aid in moderation decisions, but I feel like the average user wouldn’t really gain much from this information in exchange for a more complicated UI.
Just as an aside, in the dev chat we have been talking about this a lot and the UI has been one of the harder pieces. The main competing paradigm for the UI of this feature is to have two upvote and two downvote buttons (one set for public votes and another for local-only votes). Here is a mockup I made of the voting buttons for that:
Yeah I think having it be in settings and not having 4 voting buttons was the right choice.
