I have been working on Lemvotes, a tool to check who voted on a Lemmy post. In this blog post, I will describe how it works and the ethics of such a tool.
All the people complaining about this tool are pathetic. These votes are publicly exposed with your actor (account) over activitypub. They were never intended to be private or hidden. Mastodon lets you see everyone who liked a post pretty transparently and is very transparent about the fact that the data isn’t private.
@lena@gregtech.eu isn’t leaking anything or exposing some hidden 0-day exploit. She is merely doing what anyone who can subscribe to see the ActivityPub stream can do. That’s any Admin or any user who can host a server with Activitypub compatible software on a domain.
Trying to bully people out of making tools like this, or get people to snitch on server admins running them is attempting to reinforce a false sense of privacy, and is a losing battle ultimately, especially when we have defederation bypassing tools out there, which when used for viewing only (not posting content) are practically undetectable.
All the people complaining about this tool are pathetic. These votes are publicly exposed with your actor (account) over activitypub. They were never intended to be private or hidden. Mastodon lets you see everyone who liked a post pretty transparently and is very transparent about the fact that the data isn’t private.
@lena@gregtech.eu isn’t leaking anything or exposing some hidden 0-day exploit. She is merely doing what anyone who can subscribe to see the ActivityPub stream can do. That’s any Admin or any user who can host a server with Activitypub compatible software on a domain.
Trying to bully people out of making tools like this, or get people to snitch on server admins running them is attempting to reinforce a false sense of privacy, and is a losing battle ultimately, especially when we have defederation bypassing tools out there, which when used for viewing only (not posting content) are practically undetectable.