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Your thoughts on federating likes/upvotes

The question at hand: do you think it is problematic that every instance that gets posts from a magazine also gets all the likes of everybody interacting with posts?

For example: you on kbin.run are subscribed to technology@lemmy.world . When you up vote any post in that magazine, lemmy.world forwards that information to anyone who is subscribed to it.

The reason is of course that the upvote counts should be as equal as possible. One option I am considering is a anonymous message as in "someone upvoted this post" instead of explicitly stating who did it. But I imagine this might not be compatible with lemmy.

The privacy concern is the reason mastodon is not announcing who liked a specific post which is leading to a lot of 0 liked posts on smaller mastodon instances.

So what do you think mbin should do in this regard? Atm we do not announce upvotes in any way and do not compensate for it. (like fetching remote stats regularly and display those)

ciferecaNinjo ,

In principle each instance could keep a running total to be added to the global total.

Consider the purpose of the votes: it’s a popularity contest for ranking within a timeline. Does the community on instance X want their timeine rankings to be influenced by votes by instance Y (which could even be prone to shenanigans)? A tiny instance might want external votes, in which case it should ask other instances what their totals are. But if an instance reaches a certain amount of activity, then external votes are actually pollution that makes scores less accurate/relevant with respect to the views of that particular community. E.g. the solar punk instance does not benefit from votes of those on a right-wing instance like hexbear.

Whatever the result is, also factor in that downvotes may come with rationale in the future.

13 ,
@13@kbin.run avatar

@BentiGorlich I personally want upvotes and downvotes of threads posts to be public to everyone on every instance, and count of favourites of microblog posts to be public only to followers.

Fitik ,

I actually like upvotes (and downvotes) being public, however I understand how not everybody thinks that. Perhaps it could be an instance setting?

originalucifer ,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

this is it exactly. the software should implement all the protocl pieces, and allow local admins to decide not only what is shown, but what is federated.

devs shouldnt be making that call.

i think up/down counts will start to make sense when people further understand the nature of the systems they are logging into. i would prefer not to create a technological solution to that ignorance.

and although its extremely unpopular, if we want reddit-like volumes of users were going to have to think about reputation points/karma. i think i just felt lemmy.world shudder

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