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.
It’s as simple as sharing vote counts but not individual identifiers between instances. Problem solved.
A user doesn’t even have to comment to be doxxed by publicly viewable upvotes. They upvote a post in a community for their local state, then upvote a post about how to get an abortion. The state subpoenas the instance admin and gets their IP and email address.
They could already do that with Reddit. Is that something that happens?
With Reddit that data could be kept between the users and admins.
I do not have any insider knowledge regarding whether Reddit has received requests for user data.
You were saying in the example of the government requesting the data. That’s not any different for reddit or Lemmy. If anything, it would be harder to get from Lemmy since it’s decentralized. And reddit is known to comply with government warrants.