It also means that you will only see the downvotes from your instance. So I would not be able to see your downvotes, because you are from kbin.social.

If you are on a large instance, like lemmy.world, you'll still see a lot of downvotes.

I'm on Beehaw, which doesn't allow downvotes. If you downvote any of my comments on Beehaw I'll literally never know unless I log in from another instance. Beehaw also won't federate your downvotes to other instances, either, so only other users on the same instance will see them.

It's a pretty great system, imho. Downvotes haven't been useful since Digg collapsed and Rediquette went out the window.

Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, and I believe that downvotes from other instances don't federate - i.e. they're only visible on the instance the user downvoted from. If you're on a massive instance and you view a popular community you'll still get "useful" numbers of downvotes but otherwise it'll mostly be upvotes.

I think Lemmy does need a more nuanced downvote system (e.g. you need to select a reason or there's a quota or something), but I'm not sure how it'd work with the wider fediverse.

Edit: I should have scrolled more, two people had already written this comment).

Hexbear has been doing pretty well for itself.

You can. Your downvote are not federated though. That means your instance knows about them, but can't send it to lemmynsfw.com since it doesn't want to know. Consequently no other instance will know about your downvote since they ask lemmynsfw.com for who voted and who didn't and not your instance.

You will be able to downvote, but if the community in question is hosted on an instance that has disabled downvotes, your downvote won't federate to anyone else. The only people who see it will be people on the same instance as you.

For users of an instance that has disabled downvotes, their timelines silently drop all downvotes, so those users see the fediverse without the impact of any downvotes, irrelevant of where they came from or what other people see.