My red line is the existence of nation states and standing armies. What is the point? The military runs any nation that has one even if the population is unaware. I’ve never been presented with an option when I lived in the US that didn’t directly support US military interventionism and the destruction of the place my family originates from, so I didn’t vote in federal elections. The constitution is literally broken and the structure of the government there is less democratic than Iran, but the Americans will never see it. The ultimate say on laws there are lifetime positions that come up when they randomly die or a fascist is in power, so they step down, it is the most comically ridiculous and frankly dishonest system I’ve ever come in contact within my life. Right now Americans are saying if you don’t vote for an appointed candidate who is a literal fucking cop then you are supporting a fascist, they have gone into nonsense land and there is no return. What even is the point. It is so sad and tragic the totalitarian mind control they are forced to live under. Most of them will never travel and will never see it from the outside.

I’m in the (years long) process of migrating and establishing residency elsewhere, but the US is a prison and I’m actually not really allowed to just leave.

requires code changes to Lemmy so not any time soon. I’d like to fuck around with it though

I got the answer I was looking for so I think so

It doesn’t seem very useful. What I see it used for is silencing opposing view points like veganism or anything that isn’t popular on Lemmy and boosting US military industrial propaganda.

I had someone test this out, if you use the API on vegantheoryclub and try to post a -1 activitypub like activity it fails. This is good for me because I was concerned bots would sign up and be silently downvoting things on other instance communities without me being able to tell.

If you are basing your understanding on misinformation on downvotes that are easily manipulated or driven by people with agendas, then you already failed being a critical thinker.

Thank you SO MUCH for testing this!

I found someone who is more familiar with programming than I am and we tested this. If downvotes are disabled posting -1 fails. Good news for me! Thanks for clarifying for me what I needed to be looking at

Right, thanks. I clarified the title of the post a bit.

What about users on my own instance? There are 50ish users now. I personally know about 30 of them and the other 20 are random sign ups, can a sign up use the api to downvote on another instance when I have downvotes disabled on my own is my question?

I’m not really a developer but I will try and put it into activitypub words I just looked up at w3, can an actor from my instance vegantheoryclub.org use the api to do a downvote activity on a community on another instance

I would prefer a way to detect the manipulators from my SQL database then doing detective work to be honest. Someone else mentioned that they can actually do this so I will have to research this.

Disabling downvotes is a feature of Lemmy, I have it disabled on vegantheoryclub.org from the admin preferences. I don’t know though if that just disables them on Lemmy-ui and compliant apps or if it actually disables them completely. What I am concerned of is someone creating an account, not using a reputable app, and sending API calls directly to my instance to federate to others.