Well yea downvotes are, IMO, objectively shite. Too many confuse them with “do not agree” and an excuse to not contribute to the conversation. Except, instead of contributing they cancel out someone else’s upvote.

The nail in the coffin for me about downvotes is that they’re too vague to be a useful piece of information. An upvote generally means “good”. A downvote can mean anything from “this is vile in need of moderation” to “I disagree” to “I don’t like your tone or general position” to, perhaps here with decentralisation, “I don’t like your instance”. All without any compulsion to contribute or converse. Pretty much guaranteed to foster some base level of toxicity.

There’s apparently a “controversial” sorting coming, which might help. Otherwise I’d be interested in an alternative way of flagging something as “bad” but not enough for moderation. Perhaps a requirement to actually post your reasoning for the “downvote” so that others can then upvote that if they like in a sort of meta commentary layer or something.

Or maybe something like hacker news where only relative long time users and contributors can downvote.