Leaving a reaction emoji automatically causes an upvote to be given to the post, even if I've already downvoted the post.

I don't know if this behaviour is intentional or a side-effect of the reaction not being a first-class supported feature of lemmy, but could this be fixed? It means sometimes I have upvoted posts that are objectionable simply because I left a reaction emoji on them.

Thanks!

Might be for compatibility reasons with the wider Fediverse?

Lemmy made an early decision to reuse "likes"/"stars" from Mastodon as upvotes and this comes with certain down-sides as they are really not the same.

That's because Piefed overloads the Like activity to federate the emojis: https://join.piefed.social/2026/04/05/how-piefed-federates-emoji-reactions/

This could be enhanced by optionally using the Dislike activity or perhaps instead use the Pleroma-style EmojiReactions: https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey/issues/5425

Edit: https://piefed.social/comment/9366765

Emoji reactions absolutely should not automatically register as an up vote, as many of them are negative. There either needs to be an option to choose up/down with the emoji, or a way to attach an emoji to a vote so it's clear what's happening.

I now need to go and remove reactions from certain posts that I definitely didn't intend to up vote.

Yep.

It's pretty awkward because of the issues OP raised but it was a quick and easy way to get something working with minimal breakage that would be fine 90% of the time. Sometimes that's good enough for a first attempt.

As a small project with minimal influence, building something that only works with other PieFed instances kinda dooms that something to irrelevance. If Lemmy ever adds proper vote-independent emoji reactions PieFed would switch to that method immediately.

It is definitely good enough as a first attempt