Egg on my face for not realizing this sooner, but because I've been primarily using lemmy through Sync I didn't realize until yesterday that my current home instance has downvoting disabled. Apparently with lemmy that's a universal setting -- no one can downvote content in any community on the instance, but also accounts on that instance can't downvote content anywhere else.

Sync still displays the downvote button regardless, and will still highlight it in blue if you click it. It wasn't until I learned about Reddthat's policy and started testing how Sync was handling it that I saw the downvote doesn't "stick" -- a refresh shows the downvote button no longer highlighted and no change in the score's content. It's silently failing while in the moment looking like it succeeded.

I've mostly been using the Sync app (which shows a downvote option everywhere), so I didn't notice the lack of downvoting until I was spending a lot of time on desktop yesterday and saw there are actually no downvote buttons anywhere 😮 on Reddthat.

I've since tracked down what seems to be the Reddthat policy discussion around this issue, which also made clear that even if I downvote content from another instance through a 3rd-party app like Sync, because I'm doing it from an account on Reddthat (which has downvoting disabled), my downvote doesn't go through!

This sucks. 🙁 Downvoting is an essential tool for users to help keep their communities on-topic and discourage bad behavior. It lets people take action against ignorance or bigotry without feeding the trolls; minimize people trying to derail discussions or be obnoxious in the comments; and prevent memes, sensationalism, and low-effort posts from flooding communities meant for thoughtful discussion.

It's unfortunate that lemmy doesn't support disabling downvotes just within specific communities yet, so this wouldn't have to be such an all-or-nothing policy, but as-is this means making Reddthat my home instance has restricted my options and given me less of a voice everywhere within the lemmyverse.

@ticoombs@reddthat.com, is there any chance this policy will be reconsidered? So many comments in the previous discussion seemed to agree that downvotes are a valuable and desired feature. It doesn't seem like that feedback has resulted in any kind of policy change yet though. Was a specific decision made after that discussion to keep voting disabled, or has it just been stuck in a wait-and-see state? Would it be possible to change this?

The Old North Church in Boston, known for the lantern signal that was a message arranged by Paul Revere, was built in 1723 and didn’t have space for a graveyard. Nine years after it opened, the organization said, “a single tomb was excavated under the sanctuary and additional tombs were added over time.” Burials took place in the crypt from 1732 to 1860.

Lots of photos in this article make it clear there's a lot more work to be done to make this viable than just getting the bridge permits (which the Quincy mayor is still trying to cause problems for).

But all the representatives quoted from health & outreach groups involved -- Victory Programs, Volunteers of America, MGH-Brigham, the Gavin Foundation, Boston Medical Center, St. Francis House, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and Bay Cove Human Services -- indicate they think it will be worth it.

It's been a staple of my Somerville experience for its massive craft beer selection, but there's a bunch of cool tidbits I didn't know about its owner and his impact on the Davis Square scene.

Don't get me wrong, most of the time I do enjoy Below Deck. But after multiple seasons, the editing and the formula are wearing on me. 😆

What else is out there that has:

• a sense of the work of travel
• more sights & culture
• some good group dynamics -- don't want a 'tour guide' show where everything's always filtered through the same person's lens. I like watching people go on a journey, together

Any recommendations?

I signed up for an account through a smaller instance that felt like it suited me, and I'm trying to build out my feed and subscribe to communities across the federated network. But it's a pain that in the search summary and in the header of viewing an individual community, the number of subscribers shown isn't actually a count of how many people are subscribed to it. It's how many people are subscribed to it, from my local instance.

Obviously being on an instance with fewer users this means the number is small on just about everything, but even for users on larger instances looking to sub to communities on federated instances, this count is underreporting. The RPG community on ttrpg.network has 1.96k subscribers, but viewed through lemmy.world it would appear to only have 301. Viewed through my local instance, it shows as only having 13. 🙁

The subscriber count is the only stat provided in Sync's search listings view and in the header of an individual sub. It should be a useful metric for determining which communities across the network are getting good traction, but under this current setup, it's not.

Would it be possible to display the total number of subs each community has, on its native instance or across all instances (does anyone more familiar with Lemmy's technical architecture know if federated subscriptions are included in this count)? Or, would you consider replacing this stat with a more useful metric to gauge the sub's popularity, like the active users per week, which seems(?) to be a community stat that is federated across all instances?

Thanks for your work on Sync! Excited to make it one of my daily go-tos again.