Unpopular Opinion

Sounds like they should have more LGBT ~~subreddits~~ (communities? Is that the term?)

Porn should definitely be separated into categories, because there is a lot of content that a lot of people don’t want to see.

An actual solution for that issue would be to require people to tag their content, and allow posters to pick what they want to see based on those tags. But for that you’d need further improvement of the software.

I would argue the actual solution is to curate your feed by subscribing to communities you enjoy and "unsubscribing" from the ones. You can even create your home (or whatever the subscribed feed is called) feed for your "finer" taste and then block communities you don't want to see in the "All" feed.

That's how I've set up my Lemmy. I have my home feed for niche communities that generally don't end up in the all feed, and for general news I have the All feed where I've selectively blocked out communities I really don't care about. Ideally I would like to set up multiple feed because there are some communities that are so small they don't end up in my home feed either. I would need a separate feed for the extra niche communities so I could participate in them and help them grow larger.

While a tag system could achieve something similar I feel like tags would probably be more annoying to use because you'll be at the mercy of whomever sets the tag. If you look at how people use tags on Steam the tags can easily overreach. I had blocked sexual content tag on Steam to get rid of sex games, and it blocked Baldur's Gate 3. Technically Baldur's gate 3 contains sexual content but there's a world of difference between an RPG with sexual content and an actual porn game. I think Valve added some other way to filter out adult games so now I use that and I don't even bother with tags.

They disabled downvotes because they want to encourage people to post porn of themselves not just to repost stuff. Getting downvoted for posting your own work isn't encouraging and essentially kills communities before they even start.

As I understand it, the reasoning is that someone posts a picture of their gaping arsehole and it gets downvoted because of the horrid hairy mole on the left cheek, it might dissuade them from posting pictures of their naked breasts — which might be more in line with the community's aesthetic sensibilities — in the future.

Which, frankly, seems kind of reasonable.

Lemmy does need more user engagement. Even if you discount the 99% of posts by repost bots, reddit's maggoty corpse still has one or two orders of magnitude more user engagement, which means more tits and gaping arseholes, even if some of them have moles. Anything that makes people more comfortable posting original smut (and other kinds of content, I suppose) here is welcome.

That said, I think this only should apply to posts, not comments, and only in specific communities. Downvoting gaping orange arseholes in political news communities, for instance, should not only be allowed but even encouraged.

(Personally I still downvote everything anyway; it might not affect the vote count, but it makes me feel better.)

It would make sense if the end result was to prevent downvotes on NSFW posts by any user, but that's not how it works in practice. My lemmynsfw account can't downvote anything, but my other accounts can downvote anything (federated).

Originated and enabled well before there were other active Lemmy instances or possibly even federation of any sort. It was put in place to stop anti-trans harassment.

Plus AFAIK it’s only truly applicable within Hexbear itself. The main effect it has is that a Hexbear user can’t downvote anything on any instance with their account.