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.
There are already Lemmy instances that don’t allow downvotes, like beehaw, so defederating seems kind of silly.
Yep, I’m using one right now. Upvotes for everyone!
Downvotes are often disproportionately used to silence members of vulnerable groups when they post in shared spaces so some instances already ignore them.
Upvotes from the microfediverse is a non issue
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.
i thought the protocol allows for all 3… upvotes, downvotes and ‘likes’
there would be no overlap on a technical level. they are already completely compatible, even if its not fully implemented. kbin/mbin call this ‘boost’
i thought the protocol allows for all 3… upvotes, downvotes and ‘likes’
Do you have a source for that, by chance? From what I can see in the documentation for the ActivityPub protocol, it only states:
6.8 Like Activity
The Like activity indicates the actor likes the object.
The side effect of receiving this in an outbox is that the server SHOULD add the object to the actor’s liked Collection.
There doesn’t appear to be any other client to server interactions for different types of likes. Afaik, Lemmy extended the ActivityPub protocol to add the downvote.
nope, you were rigt, i was wrong.
mastodon likes -> 'bin boosts
lemmy upvotes -> 'bin upvotes lemmy likes/shares -> 'bin boosts lemmy downvotes -> fuckin nowhere
i am kinda disappointed, to be honest. i want all 3.
Interestingly, lemmy and Kbin votes were originally incompatible. Lemmy saw nothing from Kbin (because Kbin upvotes were boosts), Kbin saw Lemmy upvotes as favorites.