Should Mastodon votes be federated into Lemmy?
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:
- Lemmy de-federates any votes originating from Mastodon (might be tricky as it would rely on all instances following suit)
- Add an option for the user to toggle within their settings allowing them to toggle off non-binary votes.
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i thought the protocol allows for all 3... upvotes, downvotes and 'likes'
there would be no overlap on a technical level. they are already completely compatible, even if its not fully implemented. kbin/mbin call this 'boost'
In mastodon, a "boost" is sharing a post. Maybe that's the 3rd option and mastodons likes are upvotes?
Do you have a source for that, by chance? From what I can see in the documentation for the ActivityPub protocol, it only states:
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.
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.
Lemmy's upvotes are same thing as likes, and downvotes are dislikes. This is kinda hard to tell because Mastodon doesn't federate likes, so Lemmy posts will always show up as having no favourites.