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Some Lemmy instances (e.g. Beehaw) do not support down votes. When an instance does support down-votes, authors often get zero feedback with the down votes which ultimately supports obtuse expression, shenanigans and haters. The status quo suffers from these problems:

• down voters do not need to read the comment they are down voting
• down votes empower non-moderators to suppress comments and posts
• some communities struggle to get content because of some malicious down voters who down vote every post to discourage activity and effectively sabotage the community; voting privacy shields malicious down-voters from discovery and supports their attack
• silent down votes are non-constructive
• some people make heavy use of down votes to suppress civil comments purely because of disagreement; other (more civil) users only use down votes to suppress uncivil dialog. This inequality ultimately manifests to reduce civility.
• transparency: kids and adults are accessing the same forums and adu

It would be useful to have more refined control over participation in a group. Someone should be able to create a group that gives permissions to specific individuals. A variety of permissions would be useful:

• permission to see that a community/mag exists (some groups may or may not want to be listed in searchable a public directory)
• permission to read the posts in a community/mag
• permission to vote in the community/mag
• permission to start a new thread in the community/mag
• permission to comment on an existing thread in the community/mag

A forum creator should be able to set the above perms on:

• individual accounts
• all users on an instance (e.g. users on an instance @weH8privacy.com might be unfit for voting and writing comments in the community “fightForPrivacy”)
• all users not on an instance (e.g. local users only for example)
• instance IP-based (e.g. users from Clo