this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
15 points (66.0% liked)
PieFed Meta
4772 readers
55 users here now
Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.
Wiki
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.