The question is basically the title.
It’s very hit-and-miss. But mostly miss. That picture of a cat hiding under wrapping paper taunts me.
It doesn’t seem to be related to what instance the content is on. But I haven’t been able to find any pattern.
Is there an alternative (for non-instance-admins) that works more reliably?
Some instances opt out of Lemvotes getting anything, and, afaik, it returns a generic 404 error instead of actually telling you the source instance you put into the bar has opted out.
However, it could also run into issues if there is any kind of middleman bot checking like Cloudflare or Anubis on the host instance.