We’ve got to do something about these mods, folks.

I didn’t even consider that, but yes if votes can’t be private then it’s bad to pretend that they are. It looks like there’s been some debate on the topic, but the decision was apparently to keep pretending.

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought the issue was with the follower approval feature. Apparently on Mastodon, users have the option to review all prospective followers. With this setting enabled, no one is supposed to be able to just follow your account with a click. You have to approve each one. Pixelfed wasn’t honoring this setting. I think it’s a bad feature that gives anyone who uses it a false sense of security.