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.
Good luck building a performant version.
Although I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t built a Tor version of Lemmy/mastodon yet… imagining no home instance control, you’re just donating hosting to a truly decentralized website that nobody controls but anyone can post to. It works be the ultimate dissent tool.