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.
This is what I was thinking of! I’m still learning how to find things on the fediverse, did you use one of the search engines?
If you figure out a good way let me know! I knew I’d seen this post but to find it again … well, I used Google to find a discussion on codeburg, and that had a link back to kbin!