this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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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.
Reddit moment