current implementation makes identifying the main account trivial (piefed.social/u/zIM40YKd is banned from lemmy.ml), and risks bloating the DBs of remote instances if the option is toggled.

What does it mean that piefed.social/u/zIM40YKd is banned from Lemmy.ml? Do the moderators of Lemmy.ml check up- and downvotes, and block users on the basis of them?

You'd have to ask lemmy.ml, but I suspect that the answer from them - if any - would be 'Rule {{ random_number }}'.

This also came up in this post on piefed_help - it seems incompatible with Trusted Instances.

If the concern was that MBIN users could see the main profile of PieFed users when voting, they mostly can do (again), because not much will have been sent directly to an MBIN instance - most of what they see will have been Announced out by a Trusted Instance like lemmy.world.

But I'm right that this means they have banned a user whom by definition cannot have made any other interactions than votes?

Of course I have no doubt the user has indeed been breaching upon Rule NaN.

While I appreciate this in principle, I don't think it's worth time and complexity to focus on.

If people need to vote completely anonymously they should create a separate account for it and ideally use a VPN. If not I think it's better to train people to realize that online activity is rarely truly private, even if dominant platforms have been training them to believe it is.

I've looked into it a bit more. piefed.social/u/zIM40YKd was banned relatively recently (for 'Rule 4', of course), but it complicates things a bit that that profile belongs to a user who was banned (and then unbanned) 8 months ago. Although I found another alt profile - piefed.social/u/gwRZr7CRlfd2x0 (Rule 4, again) - for which I haven't been able to find a corresponding main profile who was also banned. So, to answer your question: it seems likely, yes.

Nah this is the best feature of piefed, especially with all the fuckery which goes on in some instances. The way voting is handled by the fediverse is awful and the voting agents do a small thing to make it less awful. If anything they should just reset every few weeks

Oh... Reading that post then yeah this is useless. Can we just go back to always using the voting agents. I don't trust any instances.