Just what the title says. Can I upvote posts and comments in communities I am not subscribed for?
Yes, posts and comments are upvoteable even even not subscribed to their community. Subscribing only affects what content you see when you filter your feed to “subscribed”.
They do count.
Yes, BUT I think they only count if your home instance is properly federated with them. If that connection isn’t there, it’s my understanding that your upvotes are only visible to those in your own instance.
This is sort of incorrect depending on what you mean by “properly federated”. Lemmy instances don’t actually filter AP messages except for from blocked instances. So if you found some way to send an ActivityPub “Like” without actually viewing or subscribing, it would indeed still count. Keep in mind, Lemmy isn’t the only software that can create and publish “Like” activities.
Surely you couldn’t be viewing the post while logged in to upvote if your instance wasn’t federated…
I think you can, actually. One instance can have an entirely separate comment section. It’s almost like the users of one instance are shadow banned from the other.
Actually, I think I’m a little wrong: that happens when one instance BLOCKS another, and then you’re commenting on the blocked instance from a THIRD instance? It’s all kinda complicated and I’m not sure I grasp it fully.
It’s a common misconception, but you can view any post in the fediverse. You are not able to interact with any defederated instance.
Of course.
You can vote on posts in the local and all feed just fine.
Actually I don’t think downvotes federate with kbin (I’m not sure about between Lemmy instances?)
Downvotes are not intrinsically part of the ActivityPub standard.
…but yes upvotes federate just fine!In the current form of the ActivityPub Protocol, downvotes aren’t accounted for and thus don’t get communicated to other instances, regardless of whether they’re kbin or lemmy instances (or any other fediverse frontend).
Additionally, some instances have actively disabled downvotes.
Downvoted your comment just to test, they do get federated, though I couldn’t see it in your kbin instance cause I’m not logged on. But on sopuli.xyz (top level comment instance) and lemmy.world (post instance), your comment had 0. They’re created as “Dislike” activities in AP which is not exactly an agreed upon standard but other Lemmy instances recognise it.
afaik (and tested) it should work even if you’re not subscribed to the community
EDIT: can also create post