Votes are public to not just to the original instance admins though but to any instance admin, right? If you setup your own instance and federate with another, then you should be able to view the votes for any communities on the one you federate with. The only privacy is that the default UI doesn’t display it, but a different UI could:

e.g. the one for this post on kbin.social that shows Lemmy upvotes as favorites.

I feel like this should be more prominently disclosed to Lemmy users.

And that’s a bad thing?

The desktop is finally catching up with the more restrictive permissions model where an app doesn’t just have the ability to do anything the user can do but instead only has access to what it needs.

Going with a familiar interface style like the ones people already use on mobile just makes sense.

What would you want it to look like instead?