

Ah, my mistake, you are right. I did not look closely enough. fedia.io’s reduce tab … isn’t a tab, it’s just text. Clicking on it doesn’t do anything. Also, it seems to lack the route to show the downvotes (e.g. https://fedia.io/m/piefed/[email protected]/t/1970895/comments-on-the-points-in-https-join-piefed-social-2024-06-22-piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/down takes one to a 404).
I had to search out actual OG kbin servers (e.g. https://bin.pol.social/ and https://kbin.spritesserver.nl/ ) to double check. So OG kbin does show the downvotes (see for example https://bin.pol.social/m/[email protected]/t/11031/Hey-that-s-cool/votes/down and https://bin.pol.social/m/[email protected]/t/19503/Kosiniak-Kamysz-Przez-skladke-zdrowotna-firmy-nie-moga-tworzyc-miejsc-pracy/votes/down ) - oddly though, the only examples I can find list only downvotes from users local to the instance.
Anyways, it seems then that while upvotes are public, no major instance currently shows downvotes publicly, and no major forumiverse software (forum-like software in the fediverse) supports showing it either.
Now … if you’re expecting all votes to be leaning towards privacy, then you might still end up having a problem, in particular if you’re upvoting something controversial (for example: https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/1335132/Trump-overtakes-Harris-in-our-forecast/favourites ) but it’s still definitely an improvement for privacy-expecting new users.
Well, I guess, how would you actually do that? Like, how do you convince the owner of Toptal to fold shop so your replacement can take shape?