I guess I don’t get why the people selling you the seat have applied a fee from themselves instead of it just being part of the airfare.

What is “Carrier-imposed fees”? Isn’t the carrier the airline?

For a bit more info, Lemmy communicates with other instances with a protocol called ActivityPub.

ActivityPub it not just used by Lemmy, but also by Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc. While it doesn’t always play nice because of the specifics, it’s possible for example to subscribe to a Lemmy community from Mastodon (Lemmy currently doesn’t support the other direction, following a Mastodon user using your Lemmy account, but this is mostly only because no one has built it for Lemmy).

ActivityPub works by sending information to other servers (e.g. posts, comments, votes). Each server keeps a copy of everything federated to it (not every server gets everything, it’s subscription based, so all servers aren’t exact copies).

So with all instances having local copies, this means anyone with access to the database (e.g. the person running the instance) can simply look at the votes and see who voted which way. Since anyone can run an instance, this is one layer in which votes are public. Instance admins can actually see the individual votes right in the UI (hidden under some clicks).

Now I mentioned other software like Mastodon earlier. Mastodon is twitter-like. Lemmy is reddit-like. But there is also other software that is similar to Lemmy. Mbin and Piefed come to mind. These also run ActivityPub and receive all posts, comments, votes like a Lemmy instance, but they aren’t Lemmy. They can decide what do do with the information, including showing it to their users. But there is very little Lemmy can do to stop this since they aren’t running Lemmy software.

For this reason many think Lemmy should show the votes so people don’t assume no one can see them became they can’t.

Just ban them for vote manipulation and be done. I don’t think it’s petty, Lemmy doesn’t give you many tools to solve this so just use the one you have.

If they are downvoting posts in your community, can you not ban them from the community?