Oh I see what you are saying - PieFed would only count the downvotes from it, or some other PieFed or "trusted" instance, but it cannot stop Lemmy ones from giving downvotes, yes that makes total sense. So long as it controls the sorting feature as well as the displayed total though, that is fine with me.

It is an excellent point that PieFed communities work best when interacted with from a PieFed instance, and with reduced functionality via a Lemmy one. This has become increasingly true as so many new features have gotten added recently - like polls and flairs (user and post) - and will continue to do so as more gets added (like perhaps emoji reactions?:-P).