I am concerned that Mastodon’s unary-vote system (favorites), and Lemmy’s binary-vote system (upvotes with downvotes) are mutually exclusive.
In a unary-vote system, a post’s vote count generally has little use beyond expressing the post’s absolute popularity/engagement, whereas, in a binary vote system, a post’s vote count can be used to gauge opinions, such as its level of quality, trust, or agreement. This difference in usage makes me concerned that the votes federated from Mastodon will water down the votes originating from Lemmy.
Currently, I can think of two possible solutions to this:
- Lemmy de-federates any votes originating from Mastodon (might be tricky as it would rely on all instances following suit)
- Add an option for the user to toggle within their settings allowing them to toggle off non-binary votes.
Downvotes are also often appropriately used to silence fascists spewing hate.
If fascists are getting downvoted but not banned, you need to find a new instance
I agree, that’s why Beehaw sucks. You can spew all kinds of hateful garbage but as long as you use the right dogwhistles to have a veneer of civility people will blindly upvote it because all they see is positive reactions.