I'm on an instance that has downvoting disabled. I can't downvote. But, I also only see upvotes, and posts even on other instances are sorted by raw upvotes (not upvotes minus downvotes). If you downvote something, it looks exactly like if you'd not voted at all.
I looked at the relevant code while checking how the voting API works, and part of it is that it checks if the instance has downvoting enabled. So, it doesn't bypass it because the instance wouldn't accept the downvote.
They just can't downvote but other people can downvote them
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.
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