There’s nothing stopping a malicious user from doing that right now. Be aware that anyone who wants can already see your votes.

We already depend on trusting instances for a lot of what’s going on here, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to defederate untrusted ones.

1. Currently, any admin can modify any local user activity, can’t they?
2. Not really, your local instance may still hold the vote data for validation. And therefore could be ported and resigned.
3. Don’t see the problem.
4. Today, each instance decides whomever they want federation with. The ones who decide the criteria should be the same ones who decide whom the instance federates with.

Your first comment expands on both privacy and security. There is no privacy without some type of security.

Now to answer your questions: Yes and yes. Users from c/all were downvoting posts from a small community I’m a part of because they don’t agree with. I couldn’t see the posts from small communities that are important to me because of that. Now we have the possibility to sort by “scaled”, which fixes that. Sometimes there are discussions that are very relevant as to who is voting for what. But that discussion has nothing to do with privacy, which was your first point and went unacknowledged on your second comment.

Not only admins can see the votes, but anyone on Fediverse (except regular Lemmy users) can see them.

Security through obscurity is prone to failure when it is used by itself. If people want their votes to actually be private then another method of securing their privacy should be created.

User choice would be best indeed. The problem is that currently the votes are public but hidden from Lemmy regular users. Anonymize votes seems to be such a big problem the devs don’t even want to consider it.

I completely agree with the idea of more accountability. We are real people in acting public right here, we should be constantly aware that our actions have consequences. If you don’t want your pseudonym associated with a vote, don’t do it. It’s kinda like the opposite of 4chan, where instand of anonymous controversial content on top, here we have human-curated content being pushed up.

What it the instance signs the activity? Then it propagates to others instances after local validation. That way only local admins would have access to voting data. Malicious instances could still be defederated/blocked/have votes disregarded.

All federated data (thus public) should be easily available to the end user. Otherwise we create a false sense of security.

Still, very easy to miss a post from a small community when you’ve got many other larger subscriptions.

I think we should make every interaction publicly available, until we find a way to actually make it private. As you’ve said, anyone who wants and have the means will see the information anyway.

Vote brigading matters. If you’re subscribed to a ‘controversial’ community and every post gets downvoted to oblivion, you and other subscribers who sort by ‘hot/top’ won’t see the post unless they go directly to the community.

This slowly kills the community, even if its users are active on Lemmy.

The jaguar and anaconda population would increase for a few generations, but it would balance it out after a while.

Why do you think feral chickens are a concern? Most chicken farms in Brazil are much farther from the Amazon, the deforestation land is mostly used to grow soy for animal feed.

I believe we should tackle the problems we can solve right now, if you can stop using cars and source locally, that’s great.

Most of us can already change to a vegan lifestyle and stop contributing to intentionally killing animals that don’t want to die. Once most people get onboard with that, then we should address accidental deaths.

No need to be pedantic. I’m pointing you to the Vegan Society, who actually created the term vegan. I’m merely trying to educate you on the topic. The dictionary definition is simplifying an entire philosophy, otherwise vegans would also be okay with horse and dog races, horseback riding, using animals as labor and other forms of animal exploitation.

Quote of the important part of the article (highlights by me):

The word vegan was coined by Donald Watson from a suggestion by early members Mr George A. Henderson and his wife Fay K. Henderson that the society should be called Allvega and the magazine Allvegan.

Although the vegan diet was defined early on it was as late as 1949 before Leslie J Cross pointed out that the society lacked a definition of veganism and he suggested “[t]he principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man”. This is later clarified as “to seek an end to the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection, and by all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man”.

By that definition, animal testing is vegan as long as the end result doesn’t contain an animal product, which is not. Veganism is about not exploiting animals as far as possible and practicable.

Cultured meats will be vegan, accidental roadkill is vegan, as well as dumpster diving, because you’re not exploiting living sentient beings for that.

You can check out more info on the history of veganism: https://www.vegansociety.com/about-us/history

Being vegan requires only to change your buying choices. What your’e suggesting requires one to plant/locally source everything you consume, work close to your home, and completely change your means of transportation.

Veganism is about not exploiting animals as practicable and possible. Which one do you recognize is practicable and possible for most humans?

Roadkill is a side effect of our advancement as a civilization. Unfortunately there is no way to avoid using cars or transportation if you want to keep living in our society.

Roadkill is akin to crop deaths, a side effect of our advancements. No other way to keep our society, but animal farming can be completely avoided and it’s easy and cheap once you get to it.

There is a difference between accidental deaths and intentional killing. Veganism is about stopping animal exploitation as far as possible and practicable.

Accidentally killing an animal and eating their flesh is something completely different to deliberately killing an animal and eating them.

If you happen to find a dead animal and eat it, you are not exploiting them for their life, just their dead remains.

The animal has a inherent will to live, there is no way to compassionately kill someone that doesn’t want to die. Euthanasia is very different because the being actually wants to die.