While not necessarily about the upvotes I find the users here are still very much about being Right™ or trying to be the most liked and therefore the most conformed to their community.
The updoots may not matter but people for sure act like they do or want them to.
Ah, I see what you're saying. Under normal circumstances, I would suggest to new users to signup on the "flagship instance", but in Lemmy's case… nah.
To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain what content I'm not seeing because, well, I haven't seen it 😅. Some instances seem to do a good job of only blocking content from notoriously bad sources.
AFAIK, you're able to see pretty much everything on your instance, but Beehaw did defederate from your instance, so I think you can see their posts, but they can't see yours.
That's the thing though, it's the luck of the draw and you might be unlucky and sign up to a bad instance and then it's too late, first impression has been made and the user just goes back to Reddit.