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.
Interestingly, lemmy and Kbin votes were originally incompatible. Lemmy saw nothing from Kbin (because Kbin upvotes were boosts), Kbin saw Lemmy upvotes as favorites.
they swapped this over the summer to gain compatibility.
i hoping was ernest would add the option for downvotes., but he has not. I dont appreciate devs making decisions for admins, and it would be nice if more of the protocol was represented as at least optional.