this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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Then, based on the data, piefed.social would only potentially filter out the votes of a couple hundred people, which wouldn't be noticeable.
There is SO much more to this than how many people are directly filtered. For one, should consent matter? The lack of transparency surrounding the roll-out of this feature is very bad.
Consider this thought experiment: let's assume that Rimu makes 99.8% of all contributions to the codebase for PieFed. Now, obviously this is the very epitome of "unfair", therefore it follows that in order to achieve equity, his contributions must be limited, so that they are more in line with the level of his peers, correct?
Except... why would we want that? His contributing to the expansion of the Threadiverse benefits all of us - even those on Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. These contributions are "GOOD", and others should contribute MORE, rather than him contribute LESS. Also, we ALL have the same ability to contribute sourcecode - ultimately we can make our own implementation of the ActivityPub Protocol, or even a fork of the very same PieFed project.
When did votes become a "bad" thing? And more importantly why did nobody tell us that this was coming? This comes across as an arbitrary and casual change that affects every one of us across the entire Threadiverse, which afaik was not announced on a roadmap somewhere or represents a decision made in agreement with everyone else's principles. And even then, it's worthwhile oftentimes to stick to one's guns when you KNOW for CERTAIN that you are CORRECT - but nobody seems to understand this decision, so that seems not to be the case here (at the very least the communication around this topic would have massively beneficial to have been considered in advance).
This will help ensure that the Threadiverse remains an inconsequential footnote in the larger culture, as it justifies people's decisions to avoid us here. Why would an actual content creator bother with such a tiny audience, when the capriciousness of the admins could wreak havoc on their world at any moment? ... as it just did for PugJesus. Stories like this have a way of resonating, and will help convince those on the fence to avoid this place.
This is bad for us all. Worse, I don't think it is fixable.
"First they came for..." - neither I nor you may be one of the couple hundred people directly affected (presuming your numerical inference there is correct), but I promise you that we are affected indirectly to some kind of a degree, whether very large or just medium I don't know, but either way this event represents something that is POTENTIALLY quite profound.
I personally can see there's some merit on both sides, where the change probably should've been more public and talked about before hand, and also that there can be some potential benefits to limiting votes in some fashion, since there are some instances where it's been misused, such as some people using it as a mark-as-read, sometimes with downvotes (I can't recall their username, but there was a user in the past who admitted to doing that, which I think has a negative overall effect since the first few votes of a new post have an outsized effect on if it gains traction or is more likely to be hidden).
I can't really see this having giant negative ripple effects throughout the fediverse/threadiverse since it effects such a small minority of users, but I suppose we'll see.
Directly, I agree with you: it will barely impact anyone at all. Something like 0.2% of the whole Threadiverse iirc.
Indirectly, it has already begun to impact all of us - e.g. anyone who enjoyed PugJesus, his memes or arguing with him or such.
There is also a huge amount of campism surrounding Lemmy v. PieFed, as if somehow both are not working side-by-side to make this place better than corporate enshittified media. And this gives ammunition to the anti-PieFed side to say how Rimu makes decisions without consulting the community first, injecting his personal political ideology directly into the code. I've already talked to several people about exactly that.
More arguments along these lines are coming and even if this voting suppression anti-feature were reversed today, those arguments will be long remembered in the Fediverse community, similar to how Lemmy handled the slur filter when it directly hard-coded it into the codebase and (at least initially, before MAJOR pushback) refused to make it an option that could be toggled off.
Some people will refuse to join PieFed as a result. Some, like PugJesus, may refuse to participate in the Threadiverse at all.
The ripple effects will be both as a result of the fact that PieFed is now performing voting censorship, and from the manner in which this change was released. An opt-in feature performing a similar task would have been GREAT here! Banning someone who spams votes is also a viable outcome - perhaps after a conversation with them to see if their usage was as intended or something odd that they may need coaching to do differently. But to summarily reject this submitted content with little to no warning is not welcoming at all.