What is the philosophy behind downvotes? Downvote non-productive/bad faith comments or downvote things you do not like?

Would this require you to switch between instances to view all the content you wish to follow? That doesn't seem very appealing as a user.

Right, I think this was the potential concern I was vaguely remembering.

So what is the point of congregating on a general purpose instance? I ask this because of the snippet from the root comment:

The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there)

If everything is visible from any (federated) instance, why not switch once you encounter slow down? In my comment, I was just clarifying that I understood the premise.

Something to keep in mind with these graphics are that the scales are hugely different and more notably that the numbers do not add to 100%. Also the percent vs percentage point thing mentioned by @[email protected].

Depends on what you mean by "really complicated."

If you know Brouwer's fixed point theorem in the plane and do not consider that to be complicated, then no. The curious can DM me and I will share a PDF of this little article (it is three pages).

If you know some basic Algebraic Topology (homology), Hatcher gives a proof in section 2.B for the theorem (actually, he proves something even stronger) in a little under a page.

I also see these when sorting by All in lemmy.world, for instance (no pun intended). I'm just making sure I am not confused. Sorry if I confused you in the process!