The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
You can do both!
On Reddit, enough downvotes collapse the content so people who might really not feel up to seeing any Nazi content that day, even if there’s tons of pushback against it, didn’t have to see it. (Of course, the collapsed downvoted comment might have just been an unpopular but unbigoted and unharmful opinion, like “I think Mario games are poorly made and unfun” getting downvoted to hell. But it’s a risk you know you’re taking when you open a collapsed post with a score of -17. Unpopular opinion, spammer, or hate speech?). You have to open the comment thread to see it. I do not know if anything on the Fediverse has this functionality. Until then, downvotes can still make Nazi content less easy to see by being ranked lower.
And despite the downvotes, lots of people still responded to the Nazi anyways, in a way that let me know that this was one troll and the community was very much not accepting of bigotry. That was also useful. Both things have a place.
Yeah, like I said, you can do both. One will accomplish the goal and the other is at best a waste of time and often counterproductive.
Votes don’t solve that problem. They’re only good for creating a content mill using user labor. Get rid of votes.