Earlier this month I created a new community devoted to retro mobile phones. I specifically chose RetroLemmy as host instance for reasons that should be obvious: focus on retro technologies. But I am very new to the fediverse (refugee from Reddit), and back on that other site I never owned or moderated a sub - hence I am new to the realities of community management as well. So far I am the only one who has posted in my newly started community, others have only commented - but no problem, everyone has to start somewhere.

Because of federation, and because Lemmy UI appears to always show /all by default (as opposed to just those communities which you are subscribed to, which was my experience on Reddit), the posts which I’ve been making in my niche community, devoted to a highly specialized and niche topic, have been showing up in feeds of people who have absolutely no interest in the topic at hand - or worse, have an extremely negative, hostile view regarding the retro technology I am passionate about. These non-participants have been heavily downvoting my retro community posts, and one particularly nasty person came into my 2G-centric community to make comments about how much they hate 2G and want it to die. So now I am thinking that it may be necessary to resort to use of moderation powers, perhaps even bans if gentler means fail, to keep haters out and control their damage. But before I do anything along those lines, I need to ask instance admins and fediverse elders in general for their guidance - hence this post.

First question to admins of this instance: would it be acceptable if I set rules in my community that prohibit bashing comments and malicious downvotes? Bashing here means a comment by someone with no interest in the topic at hand who came to comment only to tell us how much our retro tech sucks and how stupid we are to engage in this hobby etc. A malicious downvote means a downvote driven by the same motivation, dislike of the very topic that our community centers around. I would like to make a rule in retromobilephones community that bashing comments and downvotes are prohibited, and that repeat offenders will be subject to bans. Question to RetroLemmy instance admins: would such community rule be acceptable?

A second question is how to deal with hate that comes in the form of downvotes rather than comments. A hateful comment can be removed by a mod - but can a mod also remove malicious downvotes? If someone gets banned from a community, I assume the ban will make further downvotes impossible, but will it also wipe out already-made downvotes - or do those stay? And is there a gentler method that could be used before resorting to bans? With hateful comments, I reason I can remove the offending comment and let the commenter know that they broke the “no hate” rule, such that repeat offenses will result in a ban - but the first offense gets only comment deletion, not a ban. Is there any way to handle downvotes similarly, some way to remove a downvote without reaching for the ban hammer as first response?

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated - TIA!