You don’t have to be subscribed to see activities in a community (including downvotes) but someone on you instance does for the community know to send the activities to that instance.

Disabling downvotes doesn’t actually prevent items being downvoted, it just hides them from those that don’t want to see it.

Disabling donvotes in the instance setting does prevent them being recorded on that instance. You can see the code here.

track downvotes from outside instances

No, Lemmy just forwards the downvote to the community’s subscribers, so other instances receive them. The downvote is not written to the db on instances with it disabled.

Provenance has never been something you can guarantee with code in an open contribution model (which is not the only way of governing an open source project). For all you know the code could be copy and pasted from a proprietary codebase, or be the product of third party who’s work is being plagiarised by the submitter. A software project is ultimately a community and is build on trust and faith that people are acting in good faith. The kind of person who would deliberately (and gleefully as I’ve seen in some social media posts) go into a community and violate its stated values and standards, no matter how arbitrary and illegitimate they feel those are, has bigger character flaws to worry about than their reliance on stochastic parrots to write code.

‘No AI’ rules are ultimately about fostering certain community values and norms than guaranteeing no LLM code makes it in.

AI code bans may be impossible to enforce in the first place

I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can’t be enforced perfectly, we shouldn’t strive for it. We can’t (reasonably) run an OS free of proprietary software, does that mean the free software movement should just give up?

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Lol, they added ‘Grok is this true’ to the entire platform, just dead on arrival.

Too bad it’s made by someone who promotes ‘great replacement’ theory and stands with fascists.