Does ActivityPub send those to other instances, or does ActivityPub only send the original post and the rest (upvotes, downvotes, replies) are stored only on the original server where the post was made?
Posts and comments are federated (synchronised). Upvotes are actually a bit of a fudge, they are actually ‘Favourites’ if considered from an activity pub (e.g. Mastodon) perspective, and yes favourites are also federated.
Downvotes don’t exist in activity pub and, as a result, they do not federate between instances.
At least that is my understanding.Downvotes do federate,
but it uses protocol extensions to do it. So the downvotes won't federate to Mastodon, but it does for Lemmy and I think Kbin tooVotes federate with standard
Like
andDislike
activities which are part of Activitypub. It’s just that some platforms like Mastodon can’t handle Dislikes.Can’t handle by choice I’d guess. Given the format of individuals following individuals rather than topics in communities it doesn’t make much sense for a person to follow someone only to downvote/dislike their comments.
Technically votes are public. Only UI is hiding them. Which should be resolved, one way or another.
Edit: there was a post with that here a few weeks ago. I understand that this isn’t a real answer to your question. Maybe you find it with these hints.
Edit2: Found it. Here you’ll find more. https://mylemmy.win/post/89871
Meaning admins are purposefully allowing other people to brigade others with alts.
Lemmy fucking blows.
Honestly votes being federated seems like a bad idea imo. Would be easy to spin up an instance with thousands of fake users and manipulate posts.
Fediverse is already big enough that it could be lucrative to do so.
So then everyone just blacklists that instance. If the problem is really severe, we move to whitelisting.
It’s not hard to identify when someone is doing this.