Something I saw Ada mention, that I personally appreciate, is that we were cutting hexbear more slack than they probably deserved because they're another trans friendly instance. If a few bad actors can get you to defederate, that's a very quick way to isolate trans people from the rest of the fediverse. I agree that hexbear should be defederated, but I really think Ada's plan of giving things time to cool down before putting it up to a community vote was the best way of handling it.

There's something I'm curious about here: Blahaj has downvotes disabled while .world does not. While I don't exactly have the best idea how federation works in this case, downvotes from .world users would likely be counted in your comparison (and .world being the largest instance I assume a fair few people would've stumbled across that thread and went voting), I assume that must have some sort of an effect.

I wonder if the view from another instance has both preemptively defederated from Hexbear and has downvotes disabled (Beehaw, maybe?) would look any different.

Also, is there any proper way to see where upvotes come from? I feel like this would be a good tool to vet botting, trolling and brigading

AFAIK you can tell exactly who voted what if you have database access.

I don't think this is the proper way to do this analysis. I believe the lemmy.world vote counts should be the same as blahaj.zone. It will still include the votes from hexbear. The only difference would be that lemmy.world's view will include the down votes from lemmy.world itself. Those won't federate over to blahaj.zone since down voting is disabled on the instance.

It should be possible to do your analysis though. It will take getting a copy of the vote history for the comments on the post. Every admin of an instance that federates with blahaj.zone has a copy of that. Then you will have to run some queries on the database to filter votes by the instance they originate from.