Nice!

If [email protected] still needs mods I’d be down for helping out!

For sure, ideally this could be controlled on a community - by community basis, but AFAIK that isn’t an option with lemmy, hence my suggestion of retaining downvotes only on comments.

This would protect contributors from essentially all unwanted negative attention (since derogatory comments are against guidelines), whilst keeping negative feedback for a part of the content where folks have to actively engage to participate. (You won’t even be in the comments if you didn’t find the post interesting & engaging)

IMO up & downvotes both have a purpose. Content can be disagreeable without being rule-breaking. I’ve certainly found downvotes a helpful indicator in the past, occasionally highlighting a poor formulation that caused one of my comments to be misunderstood.

A potential middle-ground might be disallowing downvotes on post, but permitting them on comments?

Either way, big thanks to you for hosting the site, and hope the donations situation gets resolved!