Egg on my face for not realizing this sooner, but because I’ve been primarily using lemmy through Sync I didn’t realize until yesterday that my current home instance has downvoting disabled. Apparently with lemmy that’s a universal setting – no one can downvote content in any community on the instance, but also accounts on that instance can’t downvote content anywhere else.
Sync still displays the downvote button regardless, and will still highlight it in blue if you click it. It wasn’t until I learned about Reddthat’s policy and started testing how Sync was handling it that I saw the downvote doesn’t “stick” – a refresh shows the downvote button no longer highlighted and no change in the score’s content. It’s silently failing while in the moment looking like it succeeded.
Hmm, but what about the downvotes I see then (if I ever, I’m not sure as I use a global score or whatever is called).
I understand the reasoning, but then this should apply as well for social media run for companies, in all other social media there are also people whose wishes to be respected , also in the way I was thinking of this working it wouldn’t impact them in the slightest because those downvotes obviously wouldn’t get to their instances.
What happens with instances that support downvotes? I’m pretty sure we are able to downvote beehaw posts from Lemmy and it doesn’t affect them because they can’t see it there.