Wit

I respectfully disagree. Downvotes add a way of gauging the percent of people who support/don’t support a comment. Let’s say I’m asking for advice about which product to buy. With an upvotes-only system the upvote count is biased towards the earliest comment, whereas with an up/down vote system, the ratio helps you detect comments with heavy bias or blatantly wrong facts. So an upvote/downvote system makes it easier to tell the credibility of a comment, basically allowing you to indirectly gauge the opinion of the community rather than the one person who commented.

If I can still access all of that content from kbin or lemmy, what’s the problem? I get their content, but they can’t serve me ads, change kbin’s feed algorithm, or have control over anything outside their one instance.

Sorry if this is a silly question but. Let’s say I have an account on kbin, and kbin hasn’t been federated with instance B yet. I would need to subscribe to a community from instance B and from that point on they would be federated right? But how would I even subscribe if kbin can’t see any communities from instance B before they are federated?