Maestro

Why not allow anyone to see the votes? Anyone already can by using kbin or spinning up their own instance.

… and I work all day.

Exactly. Shitty mods have been a thing since newsgroups, AOL chatrooms and good old internet forums. Probably BBSes too.

I think Lemmy and Kbin publicly publish a page of blocked instances

U.S. Law applies in a lot more places than just inside U.S. borders. If you host your instance on AWS or Digital Ocean, or protect it with Cloudflare, then you’re dealing with U.S. companies, and thus U.S. law. Even if you host in a EU region of AWS for example.

You could also subscribe to the stuff you want and switch your main feed from all to subs. Whitelist instead of blacklist

This is what federation already does, mostly. Federation means that threads and comments are copied between instances and kept up-to-fate. You are reading this from a copy kept on discuss.tchncs.de. I am reading this from a copy on kbin.social. The original is kept at lemmy.world. If lemmy.world goes down then our copies remain. They are still readable. But you won’t see my new comment and I won’t see your new comment because lemmy.world was responsible for syncing our copies.

This applies to text posts, links, comments and votes. Images and videos would be gone because they are not copied, just linked to.