Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I do have privacy concerns… I live in a country where being a dissident can very easily result in “corrective violence.” It’s just that I already make my opinion public against the wishes of the status quo - upvotes and downvotes is merely a part of that.
Honestly then, you should not be posting on a public account in a public forum. Get a VPN and the TOR browser, or I2P. Read this. Don’t use Windows.
I hope you are taking profound privacy precautions. People are not as difficult to predict, and thus identify, as we think. While we cannot do it ourselves, our AI tools very much can, from even the most innocuous data.
I do, but fortunately my threat-level at the moment is low - for now. One of the (dubious) honours of living in the third-world is that targeting is still performed through decidedly analog means - but there’s no telling how long that will last. I’m not so much worried about the top brass of the goon squad having a file on me - I’m more worried about the psychopath ex-cop and his five drinking buddies living down the street.
And yes… their little plagiarithm’s ability to chew through mountains of data and present meaningful patterns out of it is pretty darn impressive. So much for the “But they can’t do anything with all that data!” argument.