Yeah I don't understand why every instance can't keep track of their own votes privately. Sure, voting manipulation is a thing, but it's possible regardless.

Honestly I really hope Lemmy does something to address this issue. Otherwise it's kind of a dealbreaker for me.

I was more comnenting that you could still reverse engineer the users who voted on a post

Still you can easily and quickly check if a user has voted on a particular post. While your method makes the tracking process quite a bit slower, it doesn't make it unrealistic. There just aren't that many users and posts as is the case with passwords. Still 100% better than the current approach, I hope this gets implemented.

While there is an enormous amount of possible passwords, there is only a limited (and quite small) amount of users. Couldn't you just hash all the usernames one by one and map the hashes to the usernames? So you could still reverse engineer the usernames of those who voted on a post.

Edit: Salting with the post id would make this attacking process harder, but still realistic. Probably the only real solution is to hide the votes table from federated instances, I'm not sure if that brings technical problems.

The problem is that it's actively worse than Reddit. While only Reddit employees can access your data and it's being sold to the highest bidder, Lemmy sells your data for $0.00.

Anyone can become an instance admin through their own instance, so your voting data is pretty much unprotected. That is the opposite of privacy. I get that it's a consequence of the fediverse, but then it just may not be the solution to social media.