this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026

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rimu@piefed.social

Okay, maybe I'm missing something? But it seems like the recent backlash upon our dev trying out caps upon our votes is just... WTF!? (piefed.social)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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IIRC, PF-dev Rimu recently explained exactly why he was trialing such limits in a recent software update post. I.e., to create a more efficient internal & external software / HW backbone, for us users, AFAIK. Based on network / host / server loads etc, as I read the updates.

But yeah... the amount of recent negative reaction so far upon that seems... weirdly outsized?
(like, WTF?)

Like-- who the heck comes here exhausted upon corporate social media, and expects a free, open-source community of devs not to tinker with the road-posts and such..?

Pardon my puzzlement here, but I'm a happy PF contributor, and love @PugJesus@piefed.social. Both the dev here and PJ are friends of a sort, and some people I will always try to support.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 56 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

Because when pressed on the question, both in the Matrix channel and on here, Rimu has admitted that the real motivation is that some people are voting 'too much' and have 'too much influence'. That was, in fact, the original reasoning brought up when he posted the graph in the Matrix channel, if memory serves, and was told by several people in the Matrix channel, including a fellow Fediverse admin, that it wasn't an 'issue' that needed solving. He went ahead anyway - implementing the voting limit before announcing it, and then only 'announcing' it as insofar as it was included as a minor detail in the update notes. It even took other Piefed instance admins by surprise.

"You are participating too much" is a shitty fucking viewpoint for any instance to have, and not one that's welcoming to users.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 weeks ago

Bummer man, sad to see you go.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

AFAIK it was an attempt to explain in good faith the point behind limiting the same kind of botting and abuse that happens across all major social media platforms, was it not?

Seriously, like that's some wild, inexplicable initiative that Rimu came up these days, just to P-O everyone available for no reason at all?

PJ, shoot me your phone# if you get a chance, I'm currently cognizant.

[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 27 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

AFAIK it was an attempt to explain in good faith the point behind limiting the same kind of botting and abuse that happens across all major social media platforms, was it not?

Rimu explicitly said that he didn't think the top voting users were bots or abusive/coordinated.

Seriously, like that’s some wild, inexplicable initiative that Rimu came up these days, just to P-O everyone available for no reason at all?

No, it's a long-standing strain of his thinking about the harms of social media. Which he's not wrong about, but the solution to that is not "Make a form of social media that's intentionally worse for the most active users", unless the only goal is to make something with the intention of failing.

PJ, shoot me your phone# if you get a chance, I’m currently cognizant.

Shit man, no disrespect intended, but I don't even give out my phone number to people I know in real life.

And I have a terrible stutter in any case, so online voice chat is uncomfortable for me.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Rimu explicitly said that he didn’t think the top voting users were bots or abusive/coordinated.

While that might be true, imagine if you will (very few here know who Rod Serling is?), not just writing the software for a legit, well-tested ActivityPub player, and then of course the (usually crappy) job of trying to administrate the sucker (a classic Fool's Journey, coming from me).

“Make a form of social media that’s intentionally worse for the most active users”, unless the only goal is to make something with the intention of failing.

I don't quite understand, sorry.

And I have a terrible stutter in any case

Thank god; I have dry pauses in my F-d up brain regions... I guess we weren't going to appear on Jimmy Kimmel anyway. XD

[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

While that might be true, imagine if you will (very few here know who Rod Serling is?), not just writing the software for a legit, well-tested ActivityPub player, and then of course the (usually crappy) job of trying to administrate the sucker (a classic Fool’s Journey, coming from me).

Rimu said after the last controversy (which was not his fault, tbf) that he was going to step away from the admin side of things.

In any case, this isn't just some random blunder or fuck-up. It's precisely that it is in-line with previous statements, proposals, and values expressed by Rimu that I think the implementation is bad fucking news going forward. I have no more trust that Piefed.social won't be an experiment in "How much can we punish users to minimize the harms of social media participation?" going forward.

I don’t quite understand, sorry.

"I think the most active users should be punished for participating so much" is a great way to drive away the most active users and drive down participation, which rarely bodes well for the long-term health of a project. It's not something that should be implemented, unless one's goal is, incomprehensibly, specifically to fail.

Certainly, it won't be reaching the goal of dislodging corporate-controlled alternatives. But I guess that's not as important as I thought it was when I made the exodus to the Fediverse.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's really weird because he killed voting agents, what was by far piefed's best feature, due to admin peer pressure. But now hes clearly taken that lesson to heart and decided to just kind of fully reject outside influence.

Like honestly if we could get voting agents back, without the awkward "trusted instance" thing I would almost not care about the quota issue.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That was a bad implementation that was doomed at the start to fail. Technical feasability should have been considered from the start, not only much later after it pissed off half the Fediverse community. Heck, now we all are in agreement that when Lemmy mods are preemptively mass-banning people who have never even so much as heard of the instances involved, much less the brand-new (or rather planned to be started) communities with zero posts in them, that this counts as "spam" at best - contaminating the modlog - and at worst even a form of "attack"? Well, the anonymized voting situation was very similar, in reverse, was it not? Breaking the standardized norms, making it look like bot swarms attempting to manipulate votes, and even if PieFed instances were not doing the former, allowing such would also have opened the door to ACTUAL bot swarms that really WERE trying to unduly influence voting, would it not?

Making real change is hard, and will take more than an idea followed up with just a few lines of code.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Frankly, none of those things are my problem. Voting agents provided a layer of protection for real users from corporate and authoritarian data mining, as well as overzealous moderation. Bot accounts could already easily pull of the same thing by automating multiple user agents, so removing that tool for real users did nothing to stop that. The outrage over the idea was complete, 100% FUD, and was an early sign of Lemmy admins fundamentally misunderstanding the problem. There was literally zero evidence presented that the feature ever assisted in any bot or troll attacks, only that it annoyed admins who wanted to power trip, actually demonstrating that it worked as intended.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Voting agents provided a layer of protection

Not anymore they don't. Building things that last requires consensus and buy-in from all the parties involved.

We don't want to be incels who upon being told "no", only continue to push forward harder.

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[–] Maiq@piefed.social 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

To me it seems like Remu doesn't like the direction the fediverse is going and decided to limit the participation of the most active users to curate his ALL feed.

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[–] Kierunkowy74@piefed.zip 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can even understand, that the voting quota is a measure against network's bot abuse, but the automatic measure is IMHO too soon for a network of scale of today's Threadiverse. One could even argue, that so few bots can skew the feeds on this network, but as voting on Fediverse is public (in spite of softwares trying to obscure it to appease the fledditors), this still can be tackled up by few moderation actions.

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[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (20 children)

I genuinely hope that there is no, has been no, and will be no directed personal attacks toward the Piefed devs over this because nobody deserves that kind of crap (especially when they're building something you use for free), but I completely understand the backlash against this particular anti-feature.

I'm not even on Piefed, but apparently I do have a horse in this race after all. Assuming I'm both reading the code correctly and that this code also handles incoming-federated votes, then my votes to piefed.social are also silently quota'd.

So, if I step away for a few days and come back and catch up in bulk (as I'm wont to do), then assuming the quota of 240 votes per day, only 240 posts and or comments originating from piefed.social are allowed to please me that day. Anything beyond that will seem like it upvoted on my end but will apparently be discarded and the OP will never see them.

If I'm interpreting that wrong, please correct me.

So apparently now I have to play resource management and track how many things on Piefed I upvote lest something I really want the OP to get credit for go silently ignored.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 13 points 2 weeks ago

It is far worse than that even: each and every instance can set its own cap. Some could set it to 0, others to 500, others leave it at the default of 240, and so on. Interestingly, PieFed.zip set it to 86,400, one vote per second over a 24-hr period, effectively disabling it from affecting humans.

However, no communities are able to state how many votes are being discarded / suppressed / censored. And what if it changes? Either the default or some instance's specific value for it? Is even that 86400 number still valid today, or might it have changed since it was set? After all, PieFed.social used to discard zero votes, while now it intentionally discards some votes, so it is a proven precedent that such things DO change over time!!

This is voting censorship, not only of PieFed's internal votes as displayed to users on the same instance, but even altering the vote counts of Lemmy users too. And unless I miss my guess, Lemmy users will of course not be told about whether their vote was accepted or rejected? Other comments in this very post seem to suggest that the counts are already showing up differently, on Lemmy vs. PieFed?

PieFed is now "shadow-banning" the votes of the most active contributors - including those coming in from Lemmy.

One of the more crucial aspects here imho is the part where nobody is being told whether their votes have been censored in the past, present, or even whether the community in question is likely to do the censoring or not in the future. This environmental variable is not "exposed" to the public in any way, at least not that we have been told.

This shadow censorship is so terribly unfriendly that I could even see as a remote possibility reputable Lemmy instances deciding to defederate from PieFed instances, in order to protect their users from the confusion that will result in posts, comments, and now also votes from Lemmy users being censored WITHOUT WARNING ⚠️. Maybe not... probably not, but while PieFed can do whatever it pleases, others can do as they please as well, and the other instances are only going to go so far along the lines of these kinds of "experiments", especially those as unannounced as this one was.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 16 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Limiting the voting is only going to negatively affect normal users, while those who abuse the system will continue to be able to do so. Regular user will hit the quota and be forced to wait; someone trying to actually influence opinions and shit will just switch to a different account and continue manipulating votes.

It's also a bit hypocritical to frame it as trying to prevent certain influences when it's being forced upon you by another dude who has complete control over the software. It's okay when it's Rimu influencing things, but not any of the actually active power users? Absolutely moronic.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Is there any point starting this up again?

Seems like everything that needs to be said has been said.

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

Not sure. Guess I hadn't seen it the first ding-dong-dang-time around.

Admittedly I'm pretty hot about such criticism.
I'll shut it, now.

[–] Elting@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Seems to me one of the nice things about the fediverse is that, if a user really wants things their own way, they can host themselves on it independently.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

"Communication" is a 2-way street, requiring consensus of multiple parties involved. Yes someone can spin up their own instance - running whatever software or variant you like, of e.g. Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, Sublinks, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc., or something else entirely new even - but others still have a choice to decide whether to federate with your instance or not.

So at some point, cooperation becomes mandatory - if you want to do anything more than simply listen in to conversations going on across the wider Fediverse, and actually and actively participate in them.

[–] Elting@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

PJ has proven themselves to be a community minded individual. Yes they have strongly held world views but not ones that are fringe, especially here. There will be instances that defederate instances of a single power user like that but maybe that isn't the worst outcome. I like having PJ here, I think they are cool. But also they are undeniably a power user which extract more of a cost for hosting than an average soul. Not trying to make it sound like any easy task to get an instance going, but that is kind of my point. The effort put into making things work justify decisions pertaining to that instance. Rimu does a lot of work to provide us all a service and I think that entitles them to more control than the rest of us have.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There are just so many factors here.

One is that appearance is sometimes more important than reality - the mere fact that PieFed is now shadow-censoring votes is going to give people severe pause about joining any instances that use it (read the other comments in this & the linked threads - people have already outright stated such, and not merely as individual users but bringing entire communities here). Note how despite only 0.2% of people will be directly affected - this number is according to Rimu's analysis - the indirect ripples are already spreading far out of proportion to that.

It would be different if this new anti-feature (I call it that since voting is a feature and this new addition removes a part of what used to be allowed, even encouraged) were much more transparently implemented - e.g. which instances use it currently, like some instances could leave those limits at the default of 240 per day, while others increase that to 500, still others 1000, maybe some lower it to 100, and these can change from moment to moment, however there is currently no way for users to know what those settings are. Some admins have even been caught by surprise, it would seem, as to what their own settings are (iirc it was a misspelled or misplaced configuration setting of the environmental variable).

Anyway this is a highly unpopular decision, but almost none of its unpopularity lies in opposition to the - as you pointed to - very sensible need to constrain resources. Look deeper than that.

Many people have been absolutely begging for people to contribute more - creating communities, offering posts (even if merely of recycled content, in order to kickstart a community of people who can then take something forward in a more sustainable manner), making comments on those posts (so that the posters do not quit in frustration due to lack of receptivity of people to their content), and yes upvoting as much as possible to people who do all of these things, to send a signal that yes we want more of such (more posts + more comments).

PugJesus did all of these things, then without warning essentially got kicked in the balls, not for having violated any rules but for doing as so many community growers have asked to be done, i.e. ostensibly the correct thing to do? He could have at the very least been offered a warning first?

PieFed is showing itself to be capricious and subject to change at a moment's notice, without warning and reputedly in stark opposition to all discussions to the contrary. Yes it can do as it pleases... but content creators will also do as they please as well. I foresee lesser donations to PieFed in the future as a result - monetary, code changes, and content offered. This greatly saddens me, I do not say this out of vindictiveness or anything like that, but rather frustration since I would have loved to see PieFed flourish. And I think it still will, but not as brightly, not as quickly, and I now think nowhere near as extensively as I previously had hopes for.

Think ahead to the next steps. Yes you are correct in the absolute narrowest sense, but there is so much more to it than that.

[–] Elting@piefed.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah I can see all those things too. I left reddit because it was too big and loud over there, and secretly I hope this place never has exponential growth. The quality of interactions here is so much higher and I think that it is directly because of being a smaller community. I know that not everyone shares that view though and most people would be glad to see many more users here. Still you are right that receiving fewer votes will be discouraging for some, and that will have a cooling effect.

[–] dudesss@piefed.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm strongly if favor of this. Its a super easy helper... in bot control.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you read Rimu's analysis post it explicitly is NOT that. (If it had been, e.g. if it would have rate-limited to like one vote per second or some such, then I would have agreed with you, it's just that it is not the case.)

It will not turn away a single bot (at least there is zero evidence that it would, nor is it meant to). It will only turn away humans. By design.

[–] dudesss@piefed.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I haven't read it. I just understood:

Rate limiting posts; and thus, rate limiting bots, and increasing human engagement over bots.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 weeks ago

I agree with everything that you have said, in theory.

And when you read it, you will understand more: that's not what this is.

Oddly enough, this will actually have the effect of increasing bot interactions over humans - although mainly this has nothing to do with bots whatsoever, only limiting human interactions to be more equitable, at the expense of the highest (voting) contributors among us, e.g. PugJesus.

But we cannot discuss this further until you've read it.

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