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.
Regarding your edit: that will only help if your instance doesn’t federate. If someone subscribes to the community on your instance, all actions (posts, comments, votes,…) are sent to all instances with subscribers and saved there.
Thank you for the insight! I’ll guess I’ll be polite here on lemmy until someone finds a way to handle it.
As a followup question: Would this not be against EU’s GDPR laws in some way?
I wouldn’t know.