Blahaj Lemmy Meta

An instance is aware of downvotes from two sources.

1. Firstly, instances know about downvotes made by its own users. It doesn't matter what those users are downvoting or what instance it comes from, by definition, the users instance needs to know about the downvote so it can forward it on

2. Secondly, instances know about downvotes that federate to them. Votes federate in one of two ways. (For these example, A B and C are all separate instances)

   i) Direct downvotes. If user A downvotes another user, user B, that downvote is federated to instance B.

   ii) Indirect downvotes. This is when groups "boost" downvotes to instances that have users that subscribe to the group. So normally, if user A downvotes user B, instance C won't know about that downvote. However, if the downvoted post is made to a group that user C is a member of, then the downvote is boosted to instance C.

Instances with disabled downvotes don't boost downvotes for communities hosted on them, and don't accept downvotes for any content that federates to it.

But it worries me if the instances that have them enabled all see a blahaj post with 50 downvotes, that it’s still having the same marginalising effect. While that is then hidden from the blahaj user.

If the community is hosted on blahaj, then this can happen, but it's not a huge issue, because the only people who will see any particular downvote are other users on the instance of the person that made the downvote. These downvotes don't federate anywhere.

However, if the community is not hosted on blahaj, then what you're describing can happen. Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done about that. The best we can do is ensure that downvotes driven by bigotry don't hide content from our users.