I googled this, and one of the top results gave me the impression that they are not private. I just wanted to get confirmation one way or t’other if possible.
looking at profiles, not seeing anything that would show up/downvotes; just posts and comments.
No, they’re not private at all, the federation shares anyone’s activity so instances can be in sync, and they need to share everything.
For example looking at the logs of my instance I see this one{ "id": "https://beehaw.org/activities/like/<uuid>", "type": "Like", "actor": "https://beehaw.org/u/<user>", "object": "https://beehaw.org/comment/<id>", "audience": "https://beehaw.org/c/<community>" }Edit: I misclicked and replayed to the comment instead of the post 😅
I would actually like to know the answer to this as well. It is conceivable that it’s not visible in the UI but in the backend of an instance it’s very visible.
They are federated, so even if you can’t see who up-voted what in the Lemmy UI, it is not really private and other Fediverse servers can see it. AFAIK they show up as favourites on Mastodon.
