and just vote to remove a post from my feed.

But do you realize that downvoting a post counts as a downvote, which can lower its visibilty across all of Lemmy in certain cases?

Downvoting just because you don’t want to see something in your feed isn’t a great use of the downvote button on this platform. If you do that a lot to posts from one specific community, the mod there might notice a pattern of downvotes coming from your account with zero comments or other interaction. It can look targeted serial downvoting, which some label as vote manipulation.

Lemmy has quite a few people who go around mass-downvoting every post in certain communities simply because they hate the topic, a particular poster, or the whole place (trust me, I know this all to well!). They’re basically serial downvoters, and it’s a real problem on here.

You don’t come across as one of those guys, but that’s probably why you’re getting mistaken for one. It’d be way better if there was just a simple “hide” button so you could remove stuff from your view without tanking the post’s score, but that’s a different topic.

And honestly, if you don’t like any of the posts in a community anyway, getting banned from it shouldn’t bother you much. You can just block the community or the user and move on.

You could probably appeal to the admin or the mod, explain the misunderstanding, and get the ban reversed.