PieFed private voting is just sad as well as toxic. Inevitably PieFed instances will be abused to facilitate manufactured downvotes from instances due to their inherent anonymity. We are already blind enough online, not being able to see upvotes or downvotes does nothing. Being able to go to mbin and see the way people vote hasn’t resulted in some huge controversy. Even the most recent controversy involved admins shouting brigade due to downvotes they didn’t like, and PieFed does nothing to prevent it.
I’m not saying people wouldn’t react to being able to see who downvoted or upvoted them, but I would liken it to a toddler phase getting used to socialization. Once people get acclimated to it, it essentially adds transparency that can explain trends, reveal stalking and remove suspicions. Without it, people just get fed up and make their own assumptions, which just feeds toxicity and division without any real awareness.
The fediverse is prone to manipulation, and PieFed makes it more so with this change without really providing a reason except that people feel uncomfortable standing behind their downvotes. Downvotes (or upvotes) from the people who can’t stand behind them shouldn’t count. The whole reputation system also sounds a bit like a love letter to reddit karmawhores, and the whole design seems to be designed to take away power from users and move it to particular instances admins to curate content through things like visibility.
Thanks for the correction, I was going off of the FAQ page, https://join.piefed.social/features/, that had a post to a thread that has not been updated.
So in that regard, is it what lemmy instances already do when they don’t want instances like mbin to see downvotes? Or does it completely eliminate federation of votes and only shows tallies from the host instance? Either way, the decision is taken from the user and basically undoes the federated aspect of the platform for a dubious concern. At the very least, it should be up to the user.