A key difference here is we can see who downvoted which I think makes people more cautious to downvote. I guess Lemmy users aren't used to that however (but it might change their behaviour when they realise we can see!)
In my view ideally upvotes and downvotes federate both ways, but I can also see why some admins might choose not to federate in downvotes.
I guess the real question comes down to what you do with the information.
I think currently the sort order is very heavily skewed towards boosts (which I actually quite like), but I do also sometimes wonder how it would look if the sort order was aligned with the reputation system (i.e. boost= two upvotes).
Having both sort options available might be nice, (noting that we'll not federate in any boosts from Lemmy).
If we did federate in downvotes the current sort order (which seems based on boosts less downvotes?) probably wouldn't make sense?
...I'm also be keen to see others thoughts on this!
Indeed, and then there is a whole raft of searching, sorting and filtering options for Microblog posts (aka Toots) which kbin does, and which Lemmy can't even see.
Afraid not, each instance is independent in that sense so you need to go through the whole account creation again (although you can use the same username again, assuming it's free).
That said, as with this instance, you can browse without needing to be logged in.
Interestingly, because of federation, this sort of happens anyway. If you'd hopped onto another kbin instance, or even Lemmy much of the content from magazines here was still accessable.
This a known bug, which has been fixed, but the fix hasn't been implemented on kbin.social.
The temporary work around is that you can't have and domains blocked. The link on e659668's post gives more details.
This will be fixed in the update planned for the end of September.