Although they can still comment and vote on your stuff (you just won't see it).

Both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are defederated from your instance of lemmy.world (see their names in the blocked part of instances, so you are safe there.:-)

Be aware though that you don't truly have Lemmy.ml blocked - that function is horribly misleading and despite how you requested to "block" the entire instance, and how Lemmy devs marketed it as a personal type of defederation, that was a lie and instead users from those instances can still: read your content, vote on it, reply to it, report it, send you DMs, and trigger notifications, the same as any unblocked user. The only thing it does is "hide communities" from that instance so that you won't see those communities, but you will still see those users everywhere else you go across the wide Threadiverse.

There is really no way to block all users from an instance while you are still using Lemmy. PieFed can easily do this (that feature being available for a year ago, though I doubt Lemmy will ever catch up in that respect - the Lemmy devs have little interest in helping people using their software to block their own personal instance), but other than that you would be looking at now-outdated (iirc) 3rd party apps or implementing custom uBlock Origin filtering rules for the web UI.

If you are interested in checking out PieFed, your own instance maintains both a Lemmy and a PieFed version, the former you are already on and the latter at https://piefed.world/, though I think your Lemmy login probably won't work for both?

There's nothing indicating that specifically. But if you're downvoting THAT much more, it's notable. There are people I see that I regularly downvote for solid reasons. Hypocrisy, whataboutism etc. But vote totals don't get that lopsided without some effort. All that means ultimately it's the ratio is lopsided.

NoooOoOo you can only have your say with updoots!!!1

I agree with this. Far as I'm concerned, even if somebody only engages with posts they hate so all of their interactions are downvotes, why the fuck should they be banned? What does forcing faux positivity gain us? Yes I understand the value in stopping vote manipulation bots, but imo there should need to be more evidence of bot status or nefarious intent than just "downvotes a lot."