Right now, downvotes (reduces) don’t federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it’s +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world.
This leaves me with a few questions:
- Is downvote federation going to be implemented?
- If so, is it a priority or something that’ll happen much further down the line?
- If not, will downvoting be removed?
I don’t think instance membership is all that arbitrary. I’m on kbin.social not hexbear or beehaw or lemmy.world for good reason, and it’s not only because kbin is technically better.
It definitely is to some extent, and voting culture isn’t a huge part of why people go to kbin.social. Kbin.social is the main Kbin instance. If someone prefers the Kbin’s UI to Lemmy’s or wants to have microblog support, many will just default to kbin.social. I came here because I thought Lemmy looked ugly and Kbin looked really nice.
When you’re introducing the fediverse to people, a lot of people are just going to go to the default instance, and it’s honestly good advice to tell people to just do that to start out (lest they turn away from the fediverse entirely due to not being able to make a choice). Voting culture has nothing to do with that. Just because someone’s on lemmy.world doesn’t mean their downvotes are worth less than ours, and just because someone’s on kbin.social doesn’t mean they don’t just hand out downvotes in order to disagree.