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.