I’m not sure it’s really possible to make votes private (at least not without sacrificing some functionality we have now.) Right now, instance admins can see vote information while non-admjns can’t, which I do think is a bad thing. It does create a privileged class with additional information that ordinary users don’t get. If there was a way to make votes private, I’d probably be ok with that, but again I’m not sure that’s possible. (Instances have to be able to prevent double-/triple-/etc voting on a single post/comment by a single user. Maybe there’s some cryptographic blind-signature wizardry that could be used to accomplish that while denying instance runners access to the information. I want to say I might have even come up with such an approach in a previous post and I might look back through my history for it, but it might also involve some concessions functionality-wise.) If that information has to be open to some, though, I think it should be open to all.

Aside from that, I like the upvote/downvote system as it is. It’s simple works nicely. I honestly use “new”/“all” sort (excluding the communities I’ve blocked) nearly exclusively, so I don’t have all that much invested in the “hot” sorting option that is the default probably on most Lemmy instances. But I like not having an algorithm (even one as good and fair as Lemmy’s) curating my content for me.

Oh! On the sorting front, though, I’d love to have a “boost” option for specific communities. Like “hey Lemmy, no matter what sort I use, make sure any post that was made to !underwater_beekeeping@lemmy.beans in the last 48 hours always appears right at the top of my feed.” Like, new/all (excluding blocks) is great, but there are communities I don’t want to miss even a single post in ever and it’d be awesome to have that.

Actually, now that I think of it, I could just only subscribe to those “don’t want to miss a single post” communities and check new/subscribed before I start doomscrolling new/all.