Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I think it’s fine going offtopic. We shouldn’t be afraid of having real social interactions with one another. In fact, I think we should promote it across all lemmys. Real conversation instead of vote or tech-driven rules bullshit is far more human. It creates real connections at a more distinct and likeable level, even if those conversations end up in disagreement everyone at least acknowledges the other person is a real person with emotions rather than a username on the internet. With small communities in particular this is important because people have good and bad days. In communities where people become regularly recognisable it’s important people also understand that when someone inevitably pops off out-of-character on one of their particularly bad days.
I agree that social interactions are good! I just learned forum etiquette at a time when the default state of any forum was everyone socializing all the time, and no topical discussion. Even communities with fewer than 20 people had to make rules about staying on-topic in topical threads, and the rules were made by and for the community, not by corporations or algorithms. Coming from that background, I feel like it’s rude to OP if I don’t stay on the topic they chose. I suppose it’s a different internet, now.