What's the plan for downvote federation?

I understand what you are saying here, and I have flip-flopped on the issue myself. At the moment I personally am a fan of the limited downvote federation because I do think it acts as a hivemind barrier; to use reddit as an example, as it got bigger the downvote was used as a means to disagree without adding any value to the discussion or to simply silence a dissenting point of view.

That is not to say there were not times when a downvote was warranted - hateful comments, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry are all more than deserving of a downvote. There are also bots and general off-topic posts & comments that may warrant a downvote.

Overall though, I think the problem is how the downvote was used (on Reddit, at least) was not conducive to discussion. However, due to the fact that upvotes and downvotes are public on kbin it is possible that behavior could change, but then that could create problems with other instances where none of that information is public to begin with. (Nobody wants to have a crazy person come after them over a downvote.)

Right now, the fediverse is pretty small and Kbin is actually the most welcoming instance I have found so far. I am not sure if the lack of downvote federation has anything to do with this, but so far I actually like it. Maybe once kbin and the expanded fediverse grows larger my opinion will change, but right now I feel like it’s helping to make it more hospitable than reddit.

Edit: grammar and clarity

@ThatOneKirbyMain2568

(B) similar expressions from other instances aren't drowned out.

Some other instances are so much bigger than ours though. The "drowning out" will likely come the other way.

I don't have time to go through and find it right now but somewhere in my comments is screenshots of the difference in voting patterns on a comment thread (it happened to be one where someone was saying kbin is mostly trolls, so it was polarizing).

Kbin had voted in a completely different way to the lemmy, but because they were so much bigger than us, the aggregate would have looked like lemmy was the consensus.

Part of the appeal of an instance for me is its culture. It's hard to develop that when we risk being drowned out.

I responded in another comment of yours, but I'll also respond here for the sake of visibility.

1. We on kbin have not developed a knee-jerk "downvote everything I disagree with" behaviour that reddit had and lemmy.world is starting to have.

I completely agree with this. From what I can tell, public voting has made people on kbin.social much more reserved with their downvotes — tending to only use them for spam, hate, off-topic, or noncontributory posts and less for just disagreement — without having the risks that come with a complete lack of downvotes (i.e., not having a quick way to give negative feedback on posts that are off-topic, noncontributory, etc.).

1. Not federating downvotes from much bigger instances allows us to develop our own culture here on kbin without it being buried in an avalanche from elsewhere.

This is a good point, but there are a lot of issues with not federating downvotes. Yes, not federating downvotes DOES help to emphasize the downvoting culture on kbin.social, but it also means that the downvote counter is misleading and unintuitive. New users would reasonably think that, like the upvote counter, the downvote counter represents anyone who's downvoted your post (outside of people on defederated instances). Having downvotes act like they do right now makes kbin.social less approachable and more confusing to new users.

Also, as long as we're using the same system as other instances, I don't want to push the idea that negative feedback from other instances doesn't matter. A downvote is ultimately a downvote, whether it's from kbin.social, another Kbin instance, or a Lemmy instance. The last thing I want is for the main Kbin instance — the one to which many will default — to have an exclusionary culture.

If we don't federate downvotes, I think we'd be better off just ditching downvotes entirely and instead having something more conducive to how we want instant negative feedback to be used. As I've mentioned in other comments in this thread, it'd be great to have a set of reactions people can use. "This is spam," "This is hateful," "This is off-topic", "This doesn't meaningfully contribute to the discussion," etc. would be a much better system for promoting the voting culture we want here on kbin.social. And if other instances adopt such a system, we could federate those reactions with them as well.

@CoffeeAddict I might be wrong but I think boosts are more important when we interact with Mastodon?