You can read the full context of this here.

Votes are transparently federated, but only shown to admins via a few special endpoints, in order to fight one of the biggest spam vectors currently on the fediverse, which is federated downvote spammers. Lemvotes is a single user server / spying tool to circumvent that reasonable expectation of user privacy.

I doubt they’ve asked their users if they want this spying tool to hoover up their votes.

Its because we block lemvotes on this server, because people don’t like their votes being exposed. Every server should do this.

IMO Its fine to sync them with syncthing, as that’s end to end encrypted.

Lemmy lets you sign up and use it without a lot of the linked identifiers that reddit requires, that can be tied to your real identity (so they can serve you targeted ads). These include things like IP addresses, your email address, browser or device fingerprint, phone number, etc.

The other privacy concern I can think of, is middle-men capturing passwords and text input, and IP addresses. As long as your server isn’t using cloudflare (unfortunately many lemmy servers are), and you aren’t using a closed-source app or web UI (unfortunately many users are), you’re likely safe.

Of course the other comments are correct that this is a public platform that’s distributed, so we have to assume nefarious agencies are scanning it, so you shouldn’t say anything that could tie your account to your real identity. Its also probably a good idea to create new accounts every so often if you’re the type of person who tends to leak that info.

Contrary to popular belief, the average American does not live day to day in fear that they are about to get fucked by the state for no reason at all, and that’s even acknowledging the measures the state goes to criminalize and punish the most desperate in us society.

We don’t fear state repression and death for the wrong opinion, looking a certain way.

US cops kill ~1000 people every year, imprisons thousands of innocent people in its war on drugs and enslaves them in prison camps, keeps ~40k immigrants in prison camps (about 7k of them are children), and holds many political prisoners. The US even executed an innocent man just a few months ago.

Oh, and just like 2 years ago facebook handed over chat messages of a woman helping her daughter get an abortion to local cops. She’s in prison now.

And these are only recent things, the US is an entire country built upon the graves of indigenous peoples: something nazi germany aspired and failed to do in eastern europe.

You can find a lot more here

The nazi’s eugenics programs were copy-pasted from California’s even, they were explicit about that.

I think you’re underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home.

Liberal democracies have historically been as brutal to their domestic populations as any historical fascist formulation. You can look at how the US treated (and still treats) it’s internal colonies / minorities. Nazi Germany explicitly wanted to carry out in eastern europe, what the US successfully carried out against native peoples, and failed.

Even outside of internal colonies, if you look at how the US or Britain treated its workers or its poor of their own races(they arguably entirely defeated its domestic working class movement, rebased their countries on finance capital, and exported class struggle to the global south), it doesn’t look any different than how the historical fascist countries also defeated their working class movements.

To me, the basis of this is western chauvinism, and belief that “liberal democracy” isn’t far worse. By pointing a finger at fascism, they get to keep their belief in the supremacy of their mode of government, that continues to wreak havoc on not just the globe, but internally also. It’s a subtle form of western-supremacist scapegoating (pointing a finger at a settler-colonialism that dared to attack western countries also)

From a lemmygrad post on fascism

The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.

British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.

This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.

Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it’s also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.