"Surveillance is a necessary thing...

no wait, not like THAT!!"

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.

I mean... ?!?

"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.

Yes PieFed allows community mods to do some strange things on a per-community basis. One cool trick is to only count "subscribed" votes, which helps avoid drive-by voting from All.

Though this vote quota issue is a per-instance setting, not able to be overwritten by a community moderator.

I think Rimu is bored, not wanting to play with UI elements and wanting to jump ahead to more back-end concerns. He gets enough flack from the Lemmy community that he has to develop a thick skin to ignore all that anyway (see latest blog post prior to v1.7), though now may be too insensitive to his real supporters of PieFed.

This communication issue is the really big take-home, as it's causing people like PugJesus to quit in protest and it will work strongly against new people joining.

Which C?

You said that it was already the plan to go about:

identifying the small percentage of accounts that may be abusing the system

I was pointing to a post showing that such had already been done, and the results of an analysis of such. There really is a lot of information about this subject, if you want to read about it - the link I sent, authored by Rimu himself - is a great place to start.

Voting agents provided a layer of protection

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.

PugJesus already shared with you a link from Rimu - https://piefed.social/comment/12082419 - showing that Rimu knows precisely who those people are. They aren't bots, they are humans who contribute to the Threadiverse in the form of votes.

If they are acting nefariously... then I would not know, bc we are not told who they are. But in theory, if they were, then yeah, just ban them? Or honey pot them I guess?

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.

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.

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.