this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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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.
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.