Thanks, that helps clarify the differences between Lemmy and PieFed. My concern isn’t mainly who can see vote records. It’s that votes can influence which posts and comments people see.

My main issue is that people often use votes as likes and dislikes, even though they’re also meant to help moderate content by handing some of that responsibility to the user base. In practice, that can be abused. I’m not exactly sure how Lemmy calculates scores or how much they affect visibility, but if downvotes were purely cosmetic, I wouldn’t have the same concern. Mass downvotes can bury good posts, while mediocre posts can get boosted simply because they’re popular.

Users can choose how votes factor into their feeds, and disabling downvotes locally won’t stop other instances from using their own votes. I’d still want reactions to be cosmetic, or at least never used by the protocol to rank or suppress content.

The topic and flair idea overlaps with what PieFed already does. The part I’m still trying to work out is whether spaces should be entirely local to each instance or whether instances could optionally share directory entries. I don’t want the largest instance to control the organization, and smaller instances should be free to organize things differently. A shared directory, if there is one, would need to be optional and not authoritative. I haven’t figured out the governance for that yet.