As someone who had a partner with chronic depression for 8 years, it doesn’t rule you out, but here’s the thing: you can’t go into a relationship expecting it (or your partner) to solve your depression. Depression is an illness, not just being sad, the thing that makes it depression is the fact that there isn’t some external thing (or lack of thing) making you sad, so a relationship isn’t going to add anything that would help.
I’m aware everyone’s experience is subjective, but drawing from my experience, you should avoid codependency. It would be very easy to fall into a relationship where your partner and the relationship becomes your source of self-worth, and caring for you becomes their source of self worth. I say this as someone who made that mistake and in the end both of us ended up happier once the relationship was over, but it was a very difficult situation to get out of for both parties. In the end caring for a partner as a source of self worth results in low self esteem, because nothing you can do will cure their depression, and both parties just end up completely burnt out.
Finally, avoid something I know my partner would have done after creating and reading this post: please don’t take the advice to not date as ‘proof’ that you’re not worth dating, that’s not true. Really the advice should say: don’t look for self-worth in a relationship.
Votes are public more of a side effect of the fact that Lemmy is federated, rather than intentionally as something to be publicly visible, I don’t believe you can go find someone’s vote history just from the normal Lemmy ui, but someone could create their own Lemmy/mastodon/kbin version (or just some custom scraper that speaks activity pub and pretends to be one of these) to start collecting vote counts.
Votes being tied to accounts makes it slightly harder to do vote manipulation, but only slightly. It would be as simple as having my server tell the server of the original post that 5000 users that totally exist voted on this post. Of course you could do the same by actually creating 5000 fake accounts on your server, but that’s marginally more work, and also slightly more detectable. There’s a lot of trust in the activity pub protocol.