i have seen downvotes posts before the update, most hexbear posts seem not attract people from others intances that downvote but the ones that get big sometimes do like the megathreads
downvotes from other instances dont affect hexbear posts last i remember
I saw someone with a 0 vote the other day and thought it was odd. I do appreciate that there are still chuds down voting us even though it doesn't matter. It's baaically like some lib-brain Skinner Box for suckers and losers.
I'm fairly certain I saw downvotes on hexbear posts way before. I think they are local to your instance, and not federatd though. If people on lemmy.ml downvote hexbear posts lemmy.ml saves that, maybe even tells hexbear about it but hexbear doesn't care. And other instances get their data from hexbear so they won't see those downvotes, only the ones local to them.