this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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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.
I had started using my Piefed account to contribute at least a little bit, since I’m fully aware that things in the Fediverse work much the same way as they do on Wikipedia: a very, very small number of people are actively involved, and the rest - the vast majority of users - benefit from it.
Time and again, it was the same usernames - including and especially PugJesus, who was always there - that kept popping up.
Now that I have to watch how one of the - if not the - most important contributor is being treated, it no longer seems worth the effort to contribute anything at all to me.
I can’t understand what the developers think they’re entitled to: The best software in the world is nothing without purpose, and that is, of course, content when it comes to any social media app.
I had apparently mistakenly thought that things might be different in the Fediverse - that there’s an awareness here that it’s not so much the platform that’s valuable, but the content. Of course, I don't mean at all to deny that the developers do a lot, but an action like this is simply unacceptable and shows a complete misunderstanding of community, which they apparently want to control rather than support. We've already had more than enough of that - that is why most users are here in the first place.
The "major-Plattform-attitude" is all too evident in the way you're treated, PugJesus.
Why shouldn’t someone who pours their heart and soul, time, and dedication into this be rewarded for it? Why shouldn’t actual contributes not be worth more than all the lurkers who contribute nothing but expect their feed to be full of exciting content?
The answer is that developers have a completely wrong view of the world: their significant contribution lies in providing a tool. However, if there is no one to create beautiful things with it, all of this is completely worthless.
I’m deeply disappointed and so disillusioned that I’ve lost all motivation to contribute anything at all.
I simply do not share the attitude of people who believe that the value of the internet lies in software, because that assumption is exactly what the providers of LLMs are making. Let them see for themselves what their software can accomplish on its own.
Bummer man, sad to see you go.
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.
Rimu explicitly said that he didn't think the top voting users were bots or abusive/coordinated.
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.
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.
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).
I don't quite understand, sorry.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was definitely a dastardly decision by mystery-person "Remu," yup!
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.
And are you closely-working with the body of ActivityPub devs and future-planners in order to make such sweeping statements upon a completely free-to-use service like this..?
I can't fully agree with you on this point.
Trolls participate. I feel more welcome on a platform where trolls are not allowed to participate too much.
Anti-science, anti-evidence peddlers of misinformation participate. I feel more welcome on a platform where they are not allowed to participate too much.
People attempting fraud and political manipulation participate. I feel more welcome on a platform where they are not allowed to participate too much.
There are many participants, each with different motives. Some of them set out deliberately to disrupt or harm the community. It is not good for the community if those participants are allowed to participate too much.
Voting is just one form of participating. It is not a universal good. It can be abused, like every other form of interaction in the community. I don't think it is true that completely unlimited voting is necessarily best for all communities and that any restriction of it is necessarily a result of a shitty attitude.
One of the aspects of the Fediverse that attracts me is that different instances can be different: they are not all required to regulate themselves by the same rules other than the rules of the ActivityPub protocol.
From my perspective, this platform (piefed.social) is welcoming in part because it does prevent some of those who would disrupt and harm its community from participating too much.
Whether the recent experiments in regulating voting will ultimately be good or bad for the community remains to be seen. But I don't think it is rooted in a shitty fucking viewpoint. I applaud the experiment. And you, of course, are free to enjoy unlimited voting on your own instance. Isn't that the point of a federation of diverse systems?
I find your disrespectful and abuse laden mischaracterization and rejection of a different viewpoint to be unwelcoming.
The issue with all of the things you mentioned is their participation, period. Not participating 'too much'.
Don't worry. You won't have to deal with me after this, on any instance. I'm out of the Fediverse after this.
Damn, sorry to hear your are leaving. I was considering it, but the .zip admins seem to be of the same mind as me and disabled the limiter.
It might be worth seeing if the anarchist fork of piefed is near completion (might be a migration option).
Either way, thank you for your contributions over the years I really enjoyed them. I hope you are able to find a location/platform where you're happy and appreciated :)
Unfortunately, the Flotilla has its own... distinct set of problems. If I return - and I wouldn't bet on it - it would probably be to .zip or .ca or the like.
For what it's worth, ive been on .zip since joining lemmy and it has been nothing but smooth sailing. We are a "boring" instance in the best sense, stuff is just working and the admin does a great job of keeping the users informed through monthly updates.
However i can definitely empathize with your frustration, you are one of the most prolific posters on the fediverse and migrating your work is still not as simple as it should be.
However you decide, thank you for all your entertaining and educational contributions 🫡
Gotcha, I can definitely understand that viewpoint.
Well, if you don't come back, I wish you happiness and a good rest of your life :)
There's a permanent home for you at lemmy.today if you want it. I'm sure we could give you enough...control... to be comfortable.
I appreciate the offer, but the issue isn't control. I could shop around for a new instance that looks stable (though, for the record, I would still probably prefer a Piefed instance - no offense to Lemmy.today) if I had the morale left to migrate my comms and build them back up, but I just... I don't. I've built them up three times, and I'm tired of rolling that boulder up the mountain. I don't have it left in me, especially since all three times it was just as they were beginning to become self-sustaining without me. It's... immensely demoralizing, and I don't have it left in me.
Maybe I'll feel different in a few months, but... I don't know, man. At some point, I have to ask myself the definition of insanity, and as much as I enjoy posting in active historical comms, getting them to the point where I'm not the only participant is long and tedious, and I just...
... feel like if it's not one thing, it's another. Kbin and lemm.ee went down. Dbzer0 shifted towards the tankies and bizarre clique shite. .world won't stop making amateurish admin mistakes. Now Piefed is playing "experiments in anti-social-media"...
Whether the Threadiverse itself has a future is a different question entirely - I suspect that it does, and that's a good thing.
But can I discern which currently-extant instance will be standing as-is in a year's time? Or will there be some fucking bullshit that comes up again, setting me back to square one trying to rebuild comms for a topic that there isn't a lot of organic growth for in the Threadiverse; comms that I can't just start and leave and act like a normal poster if I want it to have more than a dozen fucking upvotes and a post a week?
That question is... an extra weight on the already demoralizing prospect of moving, and one that I just...
... would rather not have to answer.
Tangeli, WTF?!
PJ, I straight up... you're my bro as far as I see it.
In any case, what are you weirdos doing here?