So my understanding is that non-local communities receive interactions from other instances, then the host instance relays those interactions to all subscribed instances.
It’s also my understanding that when an instance disables downvoting, it also doesn’t relay downvotes onward.
So how do I see this?
This is the scenario:
- A hexbear.net user posts to a hexbear.net community [downvotes disabled], which gets relayed to all subscribed instances like mine (thelemmy.club) and mander.xyz, etc.
- A mander.xyz user sees it and downvotes it, which is sent to Hexbear
- Hexbear receives the downvote and discards it (or at least, I always assumed so)
If it had been one of the local users of thelemmy.club I could understand seeing it, as it would be recorded in our local database. But how am I seeing a foreign downvote on a Hexbear community?
I don’t think that’s true, just because I’m pretty sure even users that aren’t explicitly subscribed still see the downvotes. I could be wrong 🤷🏻
Either way, the data is still there and is passed around to those that choose to see it. Disabling downvotes doesn’t actually prevent items being downvoted, it just hides them from those that don’t want to see it.
You don’t have to be subscribed to see activities in a community (including downvotes) but someone on you instance does for the community know to send the activities to that instance.
Disabling donvotes in the instance setting does prevent them being recorded on that instance. You can see the code here.