Interesting experiment!
I tried opening this post on a bunch of instances and here is what I found.
- Piefed instances load the image for the counter and increment it on each page refresh.
- Lemmy instances have different behavior depending on whether they enable the pict-rs image proxy or not
- instaces that don’t use the proxy load and increment the counter as expected: ani.social, lemmy.world, db0
- instances that use the proxy don’t load the image and refreshes on the page don’t increment the counter: lemmy.zip
- mbin instances don’t seem to display any post content? Unless I am missing something…idk, I haven’t ever really used mbin
My guess is that most voters are not opening up the post and viewing the counter. Basically every lemmy frontend I can think of and every mobile app let you view the image of an image post as well as vote without opening the full post and seeing the post contents. Piefed works similarly as well and will show you the image as well as let you vote without needing to load the full post body.
As for fedia, I suspect that it is falling prey to the same issue that was plaguing piefed (until we just fixed it recently after talking on another one of your posts). Creating the post and editing it so soon afterwards probably works just fine on your home instance because there is enough temporal separation between those two actions that your home instance can deal with it. However, fediverse software tends to batch outgoing federation activities, so both the create and edit activities are getting sent to other instances in the same batch. Without some way of putting the edit activity after the create activity, the edit will fail before the create completes.