Based on a true story:
You know what everyone knows, but nobody is willing to say? People with even numbered birthdays are responsible for all of society’s ills.
Is this some reference I am not familiar with?
The year, day or month?
Yes.
Oh dear, looks like I’m ⅔ bad.
You’re obviously promoting the website with r that shall not be named!? Downvoted! /s
Afaik voting is not federated so you always just see the “local reaction”.
I don’t think so. You see the votes from all federated instances which can still differ
Are you sure? I occasionally see people complain about downvotes while having 0 downvotes.
So you only see votes from instances that are federated with that instance.
If instance A is not federated with instance B, but they’re both federated with instance C, looking at a post on instance C from instance A will not show votes from instance B. But looking at it on instance C will show both A and B’s votes.
As for complaints, it’s paranoia. I’ve seen people on .world complain about Hexbear downvoting en mass, and HB doesn’t even have downvotes, and even if they did, .world wouldn’t see them since they’re not federated.
Hexbear brigades with alts on instances which do have downvotes. I am currently running a test instance which attempts to track this (I will post results in a couple of months) and it’s very obvious in some cases that this is happening. There are like 16 or 17 users I’ve found so far which do nothing but downvotes posts engaged with mostly .ml accounts on certain topics.
Federation is pretty buggy and very often you just won’t see eg. votes or even comments from federated instances even when you should be seeing them
Hell, sometimes even posts don’t federate. There was a period of a few days where Lemmy.World’s federation was messed up, and all my posts here from that period are some of the least-upvoted in this community. I figure those posts just never made it outside of Lemmy.World, or at least past anyone not directly browsing the community.
Like, I thought this post was pretty good, but it only got a handful of votes, and only a few of the comments were from accounts outside Lemmy.World.
Oh yeah definitely, I don’t know why I left posts out because the same problem affects everything that’s supposed to be federated
It definitely is, but there are several instances which do not federate downvotes
that doesnt sound right at all
The post and comment votes do federate, but it’s not particularly reliable. No clue why though. That’s a bit outside my wheelhouse and there is nothing in the documentation about post voting.
Another user explained why I likely saw the discrepancy. Though, aside from that, federation generally is very much wonky and unreliable unfortunately.
It massively improved after v18, as it introduced the federation queue. Instances now actually check if activities get successfully federated and keep trying, if not.
They will still give up in some cases, though.
