"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.

Um… my guess is probably for the money? 😜💰 💲💸🤑

This is all so terribly complex.

For instance, yes vote manipulation is arguably worse than slur filtering - both are censorship though, while then again both are changes to the contract of allowable content, rather than silent effects put upon existing submissions.

The Lemmy situation having been implemented in a HARD-CODED manner is generally considered to be overall much worse, forcing instance admins who wanted to change the situation to literally have to edit the sourcecode, whereas on PieFed all someone has to do is define an environmental variable (outside of the docker container iirc). Lemmy’s therefore was mandatory, rather than PieFed at least offering the ability to opt-out. Separately from the content of the respective issues (slurs and quotas), those process matters mean a great deal.

Lemmy also does implement its political ideology into its codebase - perhaps more in line with the features that it does NOT implement more than those that it DOES. e.g. if you recall, while Reddit lacks a modlog, it does offer a modmail, a notification bothering to tell someone that their content has been moderated, and the ability to continue conversation in a deleted post, neither of which Lemmy offers, while PieFed now allows deleted posts to remain up sometimes, and offers notifications for all moderation events. Lemmy is fairly authoritarian then, offering a great deal of power to an instance admin, a bit lesser to a moderator, and least of all to a mere user. A user has very little “rights” or “power” to affect change of their experiences on Lemmy, but PieFed is the polar opposite in that regard.

For example, PieFed offers a much more democratic style of moderation that doesn’t even need someone to decide for you what content is presented to you, by its provision of tools that allow you to decide for yourself. e.g. people bitterly complain about political topics in places like c/lemmyshitpost, which if the users were on PieFed they would not need a daddy mod, and instead could just add a keyword filter to reduce or get closer to eliminating mentions of words like “Musk” or “Trump”, etc. Notice how this is not censorship, bc it is left up to the individual recipient to decide for THEMSELVES what they want to do. Like if someone wants a break for a minute from such (or month), they can decide to do so, and then turn off the filter to resume as normal. Nobody else makes that call: just you, as the user.

This vote quota is fundamentally different though: here the votes are actually censored, not by the choice of end-user but by the instance admin. Which by itself I should add would be fine, except it was not announced almost at all, and the entire roll-out is the complete opposite of transparency. Which PieFed instances will use a vote quota & which will not? Among the former, what values are used? What if that changes later - who will notify the users that their vote contributions are no longer welcome, and on what timescale? The admins seem unprepared for all of this - I wonder if they were even told in advance that it was coming (it was discussed but were they told when a decision had been made?). I’ve seen at least two reports (possibly of the same situation) where admins were caught unawares and when they updated to v1.7 used the vote quota anti-feature without being aware of this fact.

Lemmy software is not ideal, but is manageable with effort. Now PieFed falls into that category as well, but with more features overall to start with. Use whichever you prefer - one is not more ideologically pure than the other.

I need to say though that for some people it is not as simple as using one or the other: some people actually donate to these projects, and some people have a VERY hard time donating to an instance that believes in an ideology that would see everyone in every Western civilization killed, for the crime of not being purely communist enough (although somehow Russia, China, and North Korea are “communist”, despite all the objective evidence to the contrary?). Also, the Lemmy devs have outright refused to separate donations to the further development of the Lemmy codebase vs. the operating costs of Lemmy.ml. That is not me that is tying those two concepts together: that is a firm decision by the actual developers, which they offer no negotiation on. Part of PieFed’s appeal was as an alternative to that, which is why it is so disheartening to now see that it is less “unequivocally better” and more “simply different” in terms of how it interjects its own political ideology into the codebase… although even there, as I noted above, the two are still not “equal” - i.e. Rimu did not have to expend the additional effort to make this an opt-out feature, but he did, thus limiting the amount of effort required to change the code’s behavior in this regard.

Though the ideal would have been to have expended roughly the same amount of effort and make it an opt-in rather than opt-out feature. Both Lemmy and PieFed sometimes inject their respective political ideologies into the code, but not equally so.

It’s much more a Piefed.social problem than a Piefed (all instances) problem.

I agree that in the immediate sense you leaving is related to this change having been implemented on the exact instance that you are using, but overall the outcry on this matter will be much more expansive as a result of the change to the code, rather than just the flagship instance.

That change was implemented at the software level, not as fully mandatory as anything hard-coded, but still as an opt-out rather than opt-in feature. To opt out of something you have to know that it is there, know what it does, know what the different values mean, and know how to disable it (you cannot simply “turn off” this anti-feature, though you can set the environmental variable to a value that effectively equates to that) - in short, forcing every single instance owner to expend TIME and ENERGY and the all-important & valuable ATTENTION to specifically work counter to this offering.

Maybe some instance admins pour through every line of code and do that whole procedure anyway - for all its reputed faults this seems to be what Lemmy.World does. But it’s a LOT to have to stay on top of.

So in the long run, this is going to affect the entire Threadiverse/Fediverse, well beyond a single instance, flagship or no.

PieFed.social is outright censoring votes now, deciding what people are allowed to see or not - and this affects not only people choosing to use PieFed, but also Lemmings (& users of Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc.) as well. The Algorithm has returned to social media, taking away your personal control and instead putting it into the hands of Big Daddy who knows best what’s good for you.

Then again, Lemmy.ml is famous for doing this consistently for literally YEARS. Every single community on there is an echo chamber where certain “undesirable” types of people are not allowed to interact. You could prove me wrong btw by going into any active community and speaking plainly in a negative manner about Russia, China, or North Korea. I’ll wait…? 🤪

Remember that at one time Lemmy devs also implemented a slur word filter, DIRECTLY into the codebase, in a HARD-CODED manner no less, and when the community cried out against that, Nutomic said in response:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

We hoped for better from PieFed. Instead we merely got “different”. Though the pull towards authoritarianism is hard to resist - so often it is the quickest and by far least painful path towards a desirable solution (see e.g. Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars), and I can’t fully judge anyone for considering it. Worse, it might be the height of naïveté to even so much as think that anything else could exist outside of pure theory (aka fantasy)? After all, who is offering a “better” platform - YOU? (me? anyone else stepping up to offer?)

So then what is “the solution”, in your mind? Based on your instance, I am guessing you will say Lemmy? In that case, what about PieFed.zip, running its own version of PieFed with the voting quota anti-feature stripped out? Maybe at the end of the day, the software becomes just a starting point, and it’s the instance admins that are the ones who decide which parts of the software will run or not.

(I still cannot see myself donating to the further development of Lemmy software though - if only for the reason that the enormous amount of time spent moderating the Lemmy.ml instance seems to leave little time leftover to actually work on new code changes, though ngl the genocidal attitude towards actively wishing the deaths of everyone living in a Western civilization does put me off a tad bit as well!)

Yes it’s fantastic how PieFed has absolutely solved the problem of onboarding. I even recommend it to people who are adamant about not switching from their existing Lemmy accounts - just taking a look at the PieFed onboarding can help inform things on their existing account, plus there’s always the chance that they may fall in love and stay… :-)

Although now that PieFed is outright censoring votes, that’s not going to play well with people trying to escape The Algorithm, which decides for them what they are allowed to see or not. An opt-in new sorting function would have been entirely different but as it stands the only way to opt-out is to avoid every instance that implements the vote quota, which is not easily or authoritatively even possible to find out before joining (and could get changed upon each subsequent update).

Maybe you can try to convey the controversy - like PieFed is great in some ways but others may not like it for “reasons”, but ofc that increases the complexity of the recommendation. And it’s not like Lemmy has zero controversy to its name as well. So perhaps just include one of each, without any explanation?

Also, use of a 3rd-party app negates most of PieFed’s onboarding utility also, which is a further complication.

PieFed.zip is a fine recommendation - maybe no need to go into any of the above and just recommend checking it out? If 3rd-party apps don’t support the onboarding, that’s kinda on them and isn’t PieFed’s fault.

Edit: oops I seem to have misunderstood what you meant in your edit paragraph. Well, I’ll leave this here in case it is interesting but it is not so precisely relevant (although it does kinda touch on the subject somewhat in general?), I see that and apologize. I disagree about labeling downvotes being disabled as “manipulation” bc anything that is done TRANSPARENTLY is not nefarious. While if stated plainly and clearly in the rules (I haven’t checked that for this community, so take the following with a grain of salt), then it seems fine? Users can simply choose to use another community if they don’t like this one - or even make their own. When you are in someone else’s house, you follow their rules.

In reality, this shit is complicated, yo. Like PugJesus did not “manipulate” so much as he “affected” the visibility of content, using traditional means of using votes for the exact purpose they were designed for. But then is Rimu the one now “manipulating” the votes…? In one sense yes but perhaps in the greater sense no, bc it isn’t a nefarious underhanded changing of them so much as an unclearly-stated alteration of the literal rules of how votes work. So manipulation of the rules rather than of votes themselves directly, and ostensibly for some kind of a purpose, albeit a very very bad one that rather than providing an opt-in new scoring scheme to not allow highly active voters as much influence as previously, instead altering the vote counts themselves directly.

In short, Rimu has just implemented an “Algorithm” that now controls what we see on the Threadiverse, deciding for everyone using it (even people on Lemmy! if they are federating with a community located on PieFed) what we are allowed to know or not. Which brings PieFed instances closer to acting more like Reddit, Threads, and X(hitter), at a time when people are desperately trying to get AWAY from such.

So while I disagree that disabilng downvotes is similar in degree (quantity of impact), yes I see the connection that it is similar in kind (quality).

Basically every PieFed community would now need a warning message attached about how it does not “fully” federate and has various caveats attached, which even that would be insufficient since iirc this change also affects votes sent to communities located on Lemmy instances as well.

Honestly this change is SO BAD that I expect it will be rolled back soon. Even then though… it will still have ripple effects for years to come.

Haha, will do! 😄

Wow, this older post hits me differently today after Rimu decided to start censoring votes by default in PieFed software (https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/2200155/improvement-for-the-vote-quota-implementation).

Keeping the Fediverse Algorithm-free is super hard work, which never ends and can be encroached upon for the best & most well-meaning of reasons.

This was funny… until PieFed started censoring the most active voters.

Shit got real, yo!