Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Reddit always had this too though. In every app I used there was an “up voted” and “down voted” tab when I would look at someone’s profile
Maybe it was an api thing?
It was. You could disable the ability for people to see what you voted on.
It’s an option in reddit settings to make your votes public or not. Of course site admins could always see them if desired, buts that’s a much more limited group than whoever the fuck starts a Lemmy instance.
That wasn’t publicly accessible. You could keep it between you and the admins.