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.