I am wondering if its related to federation? Maybe it shows local counts and then later gets updated with federation counts? This is just me speculating.

It might have something to do with the federated nature of Lemmy. Users from other instances can also upvote, even if they’re not registered on the post’s given instance. This may mean that vote tallying follows a different kind of algorithm than what we may be accustomed to elsewhere.

That seems to be a bug. I had a post become a completely different one, while typing out a comment, once. There’s also the front page sometimes refreshing in annoying ways, or showing posts from clearly different sort methods. Or posts appearing from other communities, on a community page! All of these seem to go away with a refresh, tho.

This is all new, very complex, and put together by volunteers. I don’t know if you are familiar with FOSS software development, but us users can help by reporting on issues, when we run into them.

Here is the github of the Lemmy project