If some things get downvoted way out of proportion, and those downvotes come mostly from people in certain instances, and instances have the power to block each other, it stands to reason some instance out there managed to block the instances that contribute the most downvotes, causing them to have mainly upvotes. Right?
Some instances just disable downvotes. I have no idea exactly how that functions exactly, but I’d guess that matters. IIRC Beehaw and Lemmynsfw have both disabled downvotes. There’s probably more.
To be clear, you can still be heavily downvoted, you just won’t see it.
They disable downvotes on their own instance, which means they also don’t federate downvotes from other instances to their own.
I can still be heavily downvoted on say, lemmy.world, I just won’t see it. People using the instance the downvotes are originating on will see it, however.
beehaw definitely
“how that functions exactly” - well, you just change the code to ignore it when a user does try to downvote something, don’t store it in the database or forward it to other users/servers…
It’s just an option in the admin settings to enable or disable downvotes, no code editing needed
Ah, that is even easier, TIL
I mean more in relation to federation. I’m not sure how downvotes work with federation as a whole, honestly.
As far as I understand ActivityPub (which, admittedly, is only very rudimentarily), downvotes are an action like any other: you perform them on your instance, then the instance sends them to the instance the community is hosted on, then that instance sends them to all instances which have users who are subscribed to it.
An instance which has disabled downvotes will ignore all of that, i.e. will not store downvotes or forward them to anyone. If you look at beehaw.org you can see all posts and comments are displayed with zero downvotes, even if you view them from another instance.
That answered my question exactly, thanks very much!
Mine disables it also (blahaj.zone).