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Is this the typical behaviour of fediverse users? Posts in Apple and Nintendo communities immediately get downvoted by people disliking the companies. Can’t they just block the communities?
(media.piefed.social)
Yes, it's typical.
Votes don't mean much, but communities that deviate from the main spirit have to live with them. (And yes, that's mostly bad, even though in a few cases it's good.)
No, to be fair, they can ban the downvoters
Yes, they can. But that's quite a lot of permanent work. Lots of people interact with the content here without even looking where it is.
I have only seen the "bad" unaligned communities doing that. The ones that actually have interesting stuff seem to just live with the votes.
I don't mean ban every downvoter, but ban repeat downvoters. People who are clearly downvoting most things posted without any pattern.
That requires the effort of either writing or at least running a bot to perform that action, or PieFed can prevent the downvoting before it happens. e.g. Blaze shared this screenshot elsewhere in this OP:
That only impacts communities on Piefed locally. So people unsubscribed from other instances, etc could still downvote and harm a posts visibility across the fediverse.
In any case, I personally haven't identified post downvoting on the whole to be that much of an issue that it is impossible to not notice repeat downvoters by just checking posts a few times a day for a week. Not many people do it.
Obviously if you are running a controversial community it might be different.
Are you absolutely certain of that - that is not what the feature description seems to indicate? If true, that sounds like a bug request should be submitted, either to fix the feature itself or at least the description to match, although I do not moderate any communities on PieFed so I lack personal experience with this and will have to leave it to you who knows.
I would have naively guessed that it would be trivially easy for PieFed to know which users were subscribed to a community vs. not, but maybe it's in an inaccessible form or something.
Piefed can't control lemmy instances like that. I don't know if it crosses over Piefed instances (I'll ask rimu later) but I can't see why it would work on lemmy instances. Similarly lemmy.blahaj blocks all downvotes, but it can't stop people outside of lemmy.blahaj from downvoting posts from lemmy.blahaj. People still see downvotes on lemmy.blahaj communities if they're looking at them from lemmy.world. It just means that from a lemmy.blahaj user's perspective, there are no downvotes on anything.
Yeah, Piefed can read this - but it can only control the downvotes on its own instance.
Oh I see what you are saying - PieFed would only count the downvotes from it, or some other PieFed or "trusted" instance, but it cannot stop Lemmy ones from giving downvotes, yes that makes total sense. So long as it controls the sorting feature as well as the displayed total though, that is fine with me.
It is an excellent point that PieFed communities work best when interacted with from a PieFed instance, and with reduced functionality via a Lemmy one. This has become increasingly true as so many new features have gotten added recently - like polls and flairs (user and post) - and will continue to do so as more gets added (like perhaps emoji reactions?:-P).