I understand Beehaw’s policy on downvotes: I’ve not thought of it long enough to say whether I agree or not (well, I guess I should also study some psychology and sociology to really form a meaningful opinion on that), but I have, in principle, no problems with it.
However, in some communities that are not on Beehaw (and thus not necessarily agree with Beehaw policies) user downvotes work as kind-of a “soft” moderation and I feel like I could better contribute to those communities if I could downvote posts/comments that I find distasteful or inappropriate but that the mod won’t remove (I know I can just reply with a reprimand, but that’s a lot of work and doesn’t reduce the reach of the inappropriate post/comment).
Now here’s my question: are downvotes being disabled on “foreign” communities because of some technical limitation or is the idea that Beehaw’s users should not be able to downvote, regardless of how communities may work?
My understanding is that there’s a single setting for “allow downvotes” and, if that’s set to false, it disallows down voting everywhere for users that are a part of that instance. Incidentally, that also means that users from other instances can down vote stuff on Beehaw, but it has no visible effect for Beehaw members (mentioning this because it was a source of confusion in a separate post where down votes were discussed).
I can’t speak for the admins about if this will change if the option becomes available, but at least for now, there are a lot of things where there just isn’t a way to fine-tune settings at the moment in Lemmy and this is one of them unfortunately.