this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Lemmy

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Should Mastodon votes be federated into Lemmy? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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:

  1. Lemmy de-federates any votes originating from Mastodon (might be tricky as it would rely on all instances following suit)
  2. Add an option for the user to toggle within their settings allowing them to toggle off non-binary votes.
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

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.