K3CAN

On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.

I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol

Interesting! Not something I’ve encountered, but I suppose that’s what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.

Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again: I like the concept, but I can’t help but feel that the presentation has been consistently poor.

The earlier releases left a sour taste for some by highlighting connections to cryptocurrency, and now it’s literally being rebanded to “bitsocial”? With Bitcoin being the widest known cryptocurrency in the world, it’s definitely not alleviating the concerns that this is some sort of cryptoscam.

Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?

You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.

It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.

As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.

I have two domains through Cloudflare. They don’t mark up to price at all, so they’re basically the lowest price you’ll find that isn’t a gimmick.

I pay $6.50 for one and $10.46 for the other. Privacy is free and by default.

No harm in getting your domain from them. Just beware that when you create a DNS entry, they default to proxying the incoming connections. It is super easy to turn that “feature” off, you just have to remember to do it whenever you create a new record.