Some will cheer, some will be mildly disappointed. But I'm out, I think.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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Lemmy's issues are pretty gigantic as well - to the point where many people outright refuse to fund its further development, thus impacting the future of the Threadiverse (one example is the inordinate amount of time spent performing moderation activities rather than actually working on adding features to the codebase).
Anyway, it's good to have multiple alternative options - having more software implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol is unquestionably a good thing imho.
The social engineering though is NOT a good thing imho - fortunately it's an option that can be disabled, though unfortunately it is opt-out rather than opt-in, and not transparently handled at all.
Absolutely. My stance is not that Lemmy is not without serious flaw, just that Piefed does not seem to be the solution, to me at least.
PieFed.social is outright censoring votes now, deciding what people are allowed to see or not - and this affects not only people choosing to use PieFed, but also Lemmings (& users of Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc.) as well. The Algorithm has returned to social media, taking away your personal control and instead putting it into the hands of Big Daddy who knows best what's good for you.
Then again, Lemmy.ml is famous for doing this consistently for literally YEARS. Every single community on there is an echo chamber where certain "undesirable" types of people are not allowed to interact. You could prove me wrong btw by going into any active community and speaking plainly in a negative manner about Russia, China, or North Korea. I'll wait...? 🤪
Remember that at one time Lemmy devs also implemented a slur word filter, DIRECTLY into the codebase, in a HARD-CODED manner no less, and when the community cried out against that, Nutomic said in response:
We hoped for better from PieFed. Instead we merely got "different". Though the pull towards authoritarianism is hard to resist - so often it is the quickest and by far least painful path towards a desirable solution (see e.g. Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars), and I can't fully judge anyone for considering it. Worse, it might be the height of naïveté to even so much as think that anything else could exist outside of pure theory (aka fantasy)? After all, who is offering a "better" platform - YOU? (me? anyone else stepping up to offer?)
So then what is "the solution", in your mind? Based on your instance, I am guessing you will say Lemmy? In that case, what about PieFed.zip, running its own version of PieFed with the voting quota anti-feature stripped out? Maybe at the end of the day, the software becomes just a starting point, and it's the instance admins that are the ones who decide which parts of the software will run or not.
(I still cannot see myself donating to the further development of Lemmy software though - if only for the reason that the enormous amount of time spent moderating the Lemmy.ml instance seems to leave little time leftover to actually work on new code changes, though ngl the genocidal attitude towards actively wishing the deaths of everyone living in a Western civilization does put me off a tad bit as well!)
I agreed with you up until the slur filter:
Seems perfectly reasonable to me, unless you're one of those weirdos who just NEEDS to say slurs
For a Lemmy.world example, I was discussing medieval siege warfare (either I or someone else was quoting a primary source, I think?) when I found out that either 'fags' or 'faggots' was censored.
Had no clue before that.
Essentially, nearly every slur either has other usages (I'm reminded of overzealous word filters censoring niggardly and snigger, or 'a chink in the armor') or may still be relevant in the context of quotation (calling someone 'cunty' is being Australian, probably; calling someone 'chink' is being racist; knowing which 5-letter profanity starting with 'c' was used may be relevant in forming an opinion on someone's behavior).
Slurs should get the ban hammer, not an autocensor; and bans should be handed out by people who can judge context.
Good points, and also good thing I'm not a moderator
I feel like we're having two separate conversations.
What the Lemmy devs do with their instance is separate from what they do with their software, imo.
I've said this many times before but as I see it we have two bad choices:
Lemmy, whose devs are arguably questionable with worrysome personal politics and philosophy but who do not bake said philosophy into their software.
Or Piefes, whose devs are arguably much more acceptable and well-meaning, but who bakes their social philosophy into their software.
To me, these are both bad options, but I'll pick the side that develops agnostically without nannying tendencies. That they chose to enact stricter political bounds within their home territory is irrelevant to me because I don't spend time there and that feels well within their rights without encroaching on the autonomy of others, to me.
Or, in short: I don't care even a little bit about Lemmy.ml, I only care about Lemmy.
But as OpenStars pointed out, the Lemmy devs did just such a thing in a much more egregious (hard-coded) way previously. The slur filter is now optional after considerable time and outcry.
Piefed's vote restriction is an option that admins of any instance can fiddle with, or, effectively, disable entirely. Like the slur filter currently in Lemmy, and thus less forced than the slur filter as it was initially rolled out on Lemmy. The issue, for me, is that I made a home on Piefed.social, specifically, and now it's... not home for me.
If you don't care about what admins do on their own instance, this shouldn't bother you. I care - both in the abstract and insofar as it affects me, and so am... winding down my participation.
If it sounded like what I was trying to say was "PugJesus should have just picked and stuck with Lemmy!", then I apologize, because that is enormously not what I'm trying to say.
If anything I'm saying I understand your frustration and was just lamenting a lack of a good solution, and attempting to point to the insufficiency of all available options.
I only targeted towards Piefed because of the kind of "kumbuya" idealists that claim it's superior while being blind to its flaws.
I don't disagree with you, your frustrations, or your decision to step away rather than re-invest somewhere with another shaky foundation
I didn't take you as saying that.
I'm just saying that there isn't a difference here between the slur filter as is and the vote limiter as is in terms of implementing philosophy into the software. Both are options for admins in the software, not mandatory.
The Lemmy devs, however, initially attempted to make the slur filter mandatory, meaning that their attempt to implement their philosophy into the software was much more heavy-handed, and only walked-back after considerable outcry.
Basically, Rimu's choice here is immensely shitty, but is fundamentally more a choice of Rimu as an admin than as a dev. As a dev choice, the voting limit is of questionable utility, but not forced on instances - it's a number that admins can easily (effectively) abolish.
It's much more a Piefed.social problem than a Piefed (all instances) problem.
I agree that in the immediate sense you leaving is related to this change having been implemented on the exact instance that you are using, but overall the outcry on this matter will be much more expansive as a result of the change to the code, rather than just the flagship instance.
That change was implemented at the software level, not as fully mandatory as anything hard-coded, but still as an opt-out rather than opt-in feature. To opt out of something you have to know that it is there, know what it does, know what the different values mean, and know how to disable it (you cannot simply "turn off" this anti-feature, though you can set the environmental variable to a value that effectively equates to that) - in short, forcing every single instance owner to expend TIME and ENERGY and the all-important & valuable ATTENTION to specifically work counter to this offering.
Maybe some instance admins pour through every line of code and do that whole procedure anyway - for all its reputed faults this seems to be what Lemmy.World does. But it's a LOT to have to stay on top of.
So in the long run, this is going to affect the entire Threadiverse/Fediverse, well beyond a single instance, flagship or no.
I guess I'm just not enough of a "free speech absolutionist" to think that a slur filter, which admittedly I'm still not in support of as I think we're all adults who police themselves, is on the same level of nannying and philosophical injection as literal vote restriction.
But I see your point, thank you for clarifying and clearing up my misunderstanding
Of the two, I regard vote restriction as the more inconvenient and troublesome, certainly. But in terms of philosophy-to-code, it seems the same principle - giving admins tools in-line with the devs' values, rather than hard-coding those values into the software.
The more core issue is that Rimu, as an admin, has used that tool in a shitty way (restricting votes specifically to cut down the 'top voters', rather than any of the marginal utility uses).