Oh, I didn't notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.

For what it's worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it's not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.

Ah okay, my bad. Sorry about this.

Vibes, generally. If you see a server regularly having lots of downvotes or upvotes on things that otherwise would go the other way, it's probably a bad sign and asking the other instance admin what's going on should be a way to start figuring out how to handle it. As for activitypub, there isn't a generic server to server message that could contain a VoteTotals field while updates to the standard are proposed for addition?

Maybe a model where upvotes and downvotes can per instance be federated either publicly or aggregated? So an instance admin could choose to bundle together the vote totals and push them to other instances and it would just show the total number of votes on comments and posts by people on their server rather than the individuals. And if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.