This informs an issue I’ve had lately with a group of three people or bots following along my comment chain (All my comments, for a while, were dropping consistently to -2 score in all contexts).

It’s my understanding that votes are not public. Am I wrong?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community's subscribers.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

All votes are public, they're literally broadcast to the Fediverse writ large. You vote on something on your server, your server then tells the server owning the thing you voted on and that server then tells anyone who is interested (subscribers on other servers). That way everyone knows that this comment was voted on, but that information is indelibly tied to you - an entity on the Fediverse.

Lemmy devs just chose not to a) show that information in a UI (plenty of other software out there does) and b) not inform people that was the case. Which leads to the whole point of the thread, hiding this from users merely gives a false sense of security.