Everyone who’s into the fediverse concept should read this article.
I haven’t looked into the protocols in detail yet, but maybe it’s possible they’re using eventual consistency. Upvote counts don’t have to be 100% accurate across all instances all the time, as long as they’re eventually accurate at some point.
Part of the issue is an upvote means different things on different instances. I have a Lemmy account (inactive) and a kbin. Lemmy has Upvote, Downvote, and Star buttons which can be compared to Reddit’s system, with Star meaning saved. Kbin is different. It has Upvote, Downvote and Boost. For whatever reason, upvote on kbin is equivalent to Lemmy’s star (called favorite on kbin instead of saved) and Boost is more equivalent to a Reddit upvote. Boosts and downvotes affects post visibility and your Reputation, while upvotes seem to only save the information (for you) for later reference.
this seems so messed up. I like kbin, don’t get me wrong, but I consider this to be a bug, not a feature. When you have upvotes and downvotes one next to the other, you (a user) expect these 2 to do the exactly opposite action. Not one of them just add something in your favourites while the other starts negating another user’s karma.