while true voting privacy would be great to achieve, as long as votes have meaning there need to be methods for tracking and dealing with abuse of them. if you achieve true vote privacy, there is no way to stop someone from creating 100 alt accounts to just downvote everything that person doesn’t like, including automatically voting on new content by selected users, without anyone being able to stop them. 100 downvotes are easily enough to bury new content and ensure it won’t reach the popular feeds where it’s more likely to gain more votes.
we have already removed private votes from piefed.world and i know that there is at least one other instance considering the same. it might be tolerable when you’re on the trusted instances list of a piefed instance and still see the original voters, but this also means that instances will have to start negotiating with other instances whether they will be marked as trusted by them. i know there is at least one admin already looking into options for flat out rejecting piefed’s “private” votes and just dropping them when they federate to them, stopping them from impacting any ranking on their instance or communities hosted on their instance.
i’m afraid there was a bit of a misunderstanding. we can move the Lemmy.World and PieFed.World subscribers only, not subscribers on other instances. while we could update that on our end, that would only mean that we send content to other instances with subscribers, but it wouldn’t be synchronized on their end and show it e.g. in subscribed feeds or their subscribed communities lists.