if an instance has no users and only communities, then it’s less likely to be defederated by anyone, and easier to manage

I do the same thing (also because I don’t want to pay for tons of storage space lol) https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities

at that point why even say “the Reddit alternative called Lemmy”

you could say “the Reddit alternative called Voyager”

Proxying is a separate option from caching. I think it was added in 0.19.5

It’s way easier to notice and defed when you can see these fake usernames

You can set a Lemmy server to proxy image requests

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, if instances with downvoting disabled become popular

Personally I think downvoting is important, it’s like micro-moderation, in a democratic fashion. Sure it doesn’t always work out well, but it can be good for keeping spam and malicious posts at the bottom.