My instance has downvoting enabled, but I’ve learned that some other instances do not. Do the vote totals look different to users on different instances? It seems like some users on instances that don’t allow downvoting are unaware that it’s not the same lemmy-wide. It would be pretty confusing for them to see their vote go down.
Addressing what Jamie said as well: they won’t see the downvote on their instance, but you will see it on yours.
My understanding is that each instance has its own copy of every post, comment, and vote total. You might notice that viewing the same post from lemmy.ml vs lemmy.world, it’ll have a different point total, some comments missing, and maybe different comments and posts altogether. This is because when a user interacts with Lemmy, the instance will send out a notification to other instances that the interaction happened–once. If another instance is down or busy and misses the notification, there’s no system in place to correct it later. So when you have a situation like now where a massive influx of users is causing the biggest servers to go down constantly, those notifications are constantly missed. And if you send a downvote to a server that has them disabled, that particular server simply won’t read the downvote.