Far too often, lately, I see lots of people worried about the number of downvotes, or making preliminary justifications and requests to not downvote particular posts.
Me? I don’t have to think about any of that. The content of the posts and comments determines their quality, not some artificial number that only represents whether people dis/like something.
Edit: Wow, a lot of people from other instances seem really offended that I don’t like downvoting and seem a bit confused that I’d be thanking my admins for something I appreciate.
If you like downvoting, you don’t have to move here. Enjoy your instance’s features. Welcome to the Fediverse.
I’ve always wondered- does that work when other instance users are involved? Downvoting worked for me just now (which I undid)
On instances that do not use downvotes they aren’t counted when viewed from that instance.
FWIW, they are not counted at all, Lemmy drops the request before it makes it to the DB. So we (reddthat) have no way of knowing (from our side) if there are any down votes happening.
Which, depending on your point of view, could be a good or bad thing.
You send the downvote to your instance. Your instance takes note of it. It then forwards the “state change” to our instance. Our instance drops the request as we do not have downvotes enabled, and that’s it. :)
I do see one down vote when using voyager. Is this just being pulled from people who down voted it on my instance?
Yes. Downvotes would be shown locally only. So it’s only your instance.
That’s because where communities are ‘hosted’ act as a central authority, think a web with the host in the middle, instead of a completely decentralized version.
The beehaw incident defederation post over here: https://reddthat.com/post/35325 goes into more detail about the inner workings of communities.