Context: I started !norway@sopuli.xyz to be an English-language comm for Norway. There’s an existing Norway comm which focuses on Norwegian-language content and discourages too much English in the comm. I posted a simple “Hey I’m starting this comm” post, because obviously relevant. The mod took down my post without any comment, reply, or reason. Now they lurk in my English version comm, and downvote like half the posts. They’ve never actually upvoted a thing.
Oh, they also reported one of my posts as ‘Not relevant to community’.
Talk about petty. They didn’t even start the comm themselves, they took it over a few months ago because it was abandoned, and have done pretty much nothing to drive activity in it since taking it over. I decided to post here instead of YPTB because I don’t feel like it crosses the line into mod abuse, it’s just annoyingly petty.
Sounds like they might just be an asshole. Maybe remind them that all of their upvotes and downvotes are public.
It’s possible to see what others upvoted or downvoted?
you can use kbin.earth (and presumably mbin?) to see the upvotes, even if you don’t have an account there. e.g.:
https://kbin.earth/m/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world/t/907175/Mod-of-a-similar-comm-deleted-my-advertising-post-now/favourites
(edit: you may need to copy-paste the link; the web interface has problems with it. downvotes are not publicly viewable there.)
For a bit more info, Lemmy communicates with other instances with a protocol called ActivityPub.
ActivityPub it not just used by Lemmy, but also by Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc. While it doesn’t always play nice because of the specifics, it’s possible for example to subscribe to a Lemmy community from Mastodon (Lemmy currently doesn’t support the other direction, following a Mastodon user using your Lemmy account, but this is mostly only because no one has built it for Lemmy).
ActivityPub works by sending information to other servers (e.g. posts, comments, votes). Each server keeps a copy of everything federated to it (not every server gets everything, it’s subscription based, so all servers aren’t exact copies).
So with all instances having local copies, this means anyone with access to the database (e.g. the person running the instance) can simply look at the votes and see who voted which way. Since anyone can run an instance, this is one layer in which votes are public. Instance admins can actually see the individual votes right in the UI (hidden under some clicks).
Now I mentioned other software like Mastodon earlier. Mastodon is twitter-like. Lemmy is reddit-like. But there is also other software that is similar to Lemmy. Mbin and Piefed come to mind. These also run ActivityPub and receive all posts, comments, votes like a Lemmy instance, but they aren’t Lemmy. They can decide what do do with the information, including showing it to their users. But there is very little Lemmy can do to stop this since they aren’t running Lemmy software.
For this reason many think Lemmy should show the votes so people don’t assume no one can see them became they can’t.
It’s all public data. Lemmy clients don’t let you see it, though, but there might be some exceptions. Other platforms like kbin/mbin just let you view the votes for any post or comment.
I believe the newer versions of mbin only show who upvoted, they’ve taken to hiding downvote info. Still lots of other ways to view that data though.
A step in the wrong direction, in my opinion. It’s public, so to hide it behind an api seems misleading.
I agree with you there. Malicious or petty users are always willing to take the extra step to gain that information anyway.