All votes, up or down, whether from Lemmy or the local or a different PieFed instance, are now restricted by an admin-set quota value. This was quietly reported outside of Matrix channels, buried into part of the 1.7 release of the code - see the exact relevant line at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335.

This value can be adjusted however the admins desire (e.g. the PieFed.zip admins say they have set it to a ridiculously high value to essentially disable it, and other PieFed instances are coming out strongly against it), but by default is set at 240 (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/config.py#L191, thanks to flamingos@feddit.uk for reporting these lines of code). As in you can vote 240 times per day before you are blocked from doing so further. Logged-in PieFed users can see how much of their local instance quota they've used so far, but (i) no numeric values are presented, only a visual bar where you have to guess at where you are (e.g. do I have 10 votes left now? 100? 2?), (b) this will only show you the LOCAL instance quota - not the quotas of OTHER instances, and in particular the vote quota seems applied to incoming votes from Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. platforms as well as PieFed instances, and (c) none of this is explained anywhere, on any page, e.g. there is currently no way to tell which instances use those quotas, nor what values they are currently set at.

And I thought I recalled hearing that there are caps already on posts and comments too, but I haven't studied the code and I think this is not well known, if it is even true rather than me misremembering or misunderstanding something. PieFed seems to be going to some effort to limit its users ability to interact with the Threadiverse. Which obviously for some admins is going to be a big plus, to keep costs down by silencing all the "noise" from messy human interactions (although I don't fully understand this: if that is what you want then why not just stop pulling in votes altogether, and simply sort by New?) but the manner in which this implementation has been rolled out... leaves PieFed open to an immense amount of criticism.

Piefed so weird

Please don’t go, I love your content.

No, this affects each and every PieFed instance that upgrades to v1.7 (I sent you in a different reply here the exact lines of code). PugJesus' instance PieFed.social uses the now-default value of 240 as the daily vote quota. Admins may opt-out by setting the quota differently, however this will only impact votes accepted on your current instance. It will not affect votes accepted by other PieFed instances. e.g. if your instance uses 500 rather than 240, then someone looking at the identical content from PieFed.social will not see any of the second half of your daily votes: you will be able to OFFER them, and Lemmy will receive all of them, but each PieFed instance chooses itself how much it will receive or not.

And btw this information is not presented anywhere to show what these values are across each instance. Like the caps on posts and comments, it is silently effective, but not transparent in the least. So like the whole argument about whether defederations destroy the foundational principles of the ActivityPub Protocol-using Threadiverse, this new issue too is going to wreak havoc on the acceptance of PieFed in the wider Threadiverse & Fediverse communities. :-(

Wait, like total votes ever? Like you hit it and you can never vote again?? 😭

No, just over a set period of time.

That's.... really weird.

On the surface the reasoning behind it makes sense, but there is also something about it (that I can't quite point out yet) that rubs me the wrong way.

“Who decides what you see on the fediverse?”

Rimu: I do!

Yeah, I can't seem to see what it accomplishes except to make the few users that reach it kinda mad. It seems like an experiment at best to see what kind of effect it will have on hot/all.

Ohhh, that's way more tolerable! Thanks for letting me know, got worried there lol.

I think it was YouTube back in the day that used to have a max number of total likes per account? After which, it would appear as if liking worked from your end, but it didn't actually do anything on the backend. I was afraid we had one of those situations.

I'm glad I didn't jump over right away. I was going to, and then things started getting weird and uncomfortable with it.

rimu: provides a choice

smoothbrains: how dare rimu take away my freedom of choice

A choice to hard limit all users on .social to a number of votes he has determined to be sufficient.

Also let's not use ablest language please.

None of THAT background stuff will affect you on Lemmy.World, except that you’ll see a quieter network overall, especially now that PugJesus is leaving us.

Honestly not having "all" flooded with memes might leave room for some actual conversations to breathe but also chasing karma on the fediverse is wild

True... but why would restricting daily votes deal at all with that issue?

On PieFed I've used the Topic Areas to segregate things like News & Politics, and most meme communities, away from my Subscribed feed. Each Topic is but a click away where I can see all of it (regardless of community subscription or not), and I kid you not, actual POETRY manages to make it into my feed!!

So there are other ways to separate memes from other content. Like paid Lemmy 3rd-party apps, or Blaze would use an army of alts, one for each topic area that he wanted to see that day.

Even worse, if someone like PugJesus would start off each day by voting for popular content like memes and news, and only then switch to niche communities to help then grow (a common enough workflow, than I often follow myself as well?), then chopping off votes after the quota is reached (currently: 240 per day iirc) would have the opposite effect than you say: memes and news would receive a much greater proportion of the votes while the tiny niche communities would receive less.

I absolutely do not discount the desire to have better sorting capabilities - on THAT I agree with you 100% that it would be nice to reach THAT goal - but the current implementation won't get you there, plus will have many negative consequences besides. Such as reduced funding support for PieFed overall, and more people choosing to use Lemmy or other alternatives.

Tbf he is far from the only instance admin/Threadiverse software developer that does this.

But... yeah. That's sorta his role even, while ours is to either agree or not.

How does the Piefed vote limit effect your communities there, Pug? Do you believe that most people will have already reached their limit per day and prevent them from upvoting any submissions on your comms?

Or, it would be fine to discard people's votes in the sense of a new scoring algorithm that discounts them. That would be opt-in to a new feature that those of us who don't want it could simply ignore.

But to arbitrarily simply THROW VOTES AWAY? Damn that's unfriendly. Especially when the culture on the Threadiverse has been absolutely begging for activity since before the Rexodus even, while now all of a sudden in less than a week that virtue turned sour and actively became a vice?

Tbf there may be stuff that I am unaware of - like a coordinated campaign to make Russia look good at Ukraine's expense? THAT I think most people could agree with deserves shutting down. But upvotes of cat pictures? LET THE CAT-VOTES COMMENCE! i.e. a signal, conveying that...

I didn't say anything about votes, you said it would be "quieter" without PugJesus reposting memes, but I think "quiet" is in the ear of the beholder. Some of us prefer quality to artificial activity.

Guess the solution is to punish everyone else!

The Fediverse needs more HIMYM references. Also, I should start a re-watch of that.

It doesn't make sense though. It was presented as this unequal distribution thing where a few users cast the most amount of votes, but that really doesn't matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment. No one's opinion is outsized or disproportionate just because they vote on a lot of things.

It was really bad statistics from the start. It was framed sorta like wealth disparity, using the same kind of chart, but it's categorically not the same thing.

Thank you for your service Pug o7

Ah, we'll miss you. Your content is consistently some of the best out here.

The piefed admins are making a huge mistake with this change, and they're basing it on bad statistical methods. Every user already only gets one vote per post or comment, so it really doesn't matter if some users exercise that ability more than others. So framing it the same way as wealth disparity (literally using the same kind of chart) was not very insightful.

And to think I was considering switching to piefed soon... guess not anymore...

Oh yes for sure - beauty is most definitely in the eye of the beholder. Some people might prefer to spin up an instance and remove all votes from it, preferring to browse solely by community and/or All (related: some might disable only downvotes but retain upvotes). Other people might prefer to disable even comments, preferring to use the Threadiverse as an RSS reader, link aggregator, without any of the pesky social interaction - that's not what I personally want but if someone wants that... then fine, go for it?

"Quieter" there was a modifier for the previous word "affect" - i.e., how the downstream effects would impact the person being replied to there, not a value judgement but an explanation of noticeable changes.

I'm perfectly fine with an instance admin tuning their personal instance however they choose - e.g. blocking the major posters in memes and news communities, if they want a lower internet bill and to sort through content how they wish.

That said, this change in the PieFed software was VERY unexpected, not announced almost at all, not transparent at all, and rolled out by default to impact all upgrades to the v1.7 codebase. PieFed.social is NOT someone's personal instance - it is the very flagship instance of the entire PieFed subset of the Threadiverse. So some level of prior expectations are to be expected to come into play in regards to what settings it will choose to use - especially if those are subject to change with little to no notice, and with such major impacts upon the people who have chosen to use it?

PugJesus has donated an IMMENSE amount of time to enhance the Threadiverse, and now not only him but many of us are losing hope in not only PieFed but in this entire Threadiverse experiment overall.

This is quite impactful!

NO! Please! Say it ain't so!

I just don't have it in me to continue in unstable conditions, and all I see from the Fediverse, after my experiences here, is instability or the possibility thereof.

Life is entropy, I guess. Sorry if that adds an unneeded existential crisis to what you're already dealing with, but it's the truth. Stable systems/conditions are a myth.

I know you said you don't have another migration in you, and I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise. But if you ever change your mind, sopuli seems pretty chill. I honestly don't know much about it, but that's exactly what I mean. I've literally never seen or heard anything from the sopuli admins. For all I know they don't even exist. They do of course, somewhere in the background, but they're very hands-off. I think they're based in Finland.

what you call enhance i call low effort slop that turns away new users BUT to each their own i guess

copying a jpg and posting it is not a high effort activity I'm sorry it just drowns out other types of content

"migrate all my comms" what does that mean and why would you do it?

Lol Troll Harder

That sounds like the PieFed admins are just going to make it worse. Now there's going to be first user advantage, with the first comments on a thread getting preferrential treatment

This can't be happening

I don't see how. Unless you mean people rationing their votes are less likely to scroll as far down?

But yeah this place is going to be desolate without pugjesus, and I wonder how many more people are gonna leave once users rationing votes results in content receiving less engagement.

Overall, just a terrible decision in my opinion

More than mildly disappointed to hear, though I totally understand. Yours was, in my opinion, the best content on the Fediverse. You will be sorely missed, and I hope where you go next ends up a more peaceful and less disruptive experience. o7

It's like being a self-righteous ideologue is a prerequisite to make threadiverse software.

That's the spirit!

Some people want USA politics, others want to go a single fucking minute without having it shoved into our faces, and everywhere in-between.

It's been so nice that the Threadiverse provides a platform where we can all get along. Though huge major cracks are tearing it apart.

Re-creating the comms I run on a different instance.

Most of my activity is in those comms, and there's not a lot in the way of alternatives for most of them, topic-wise.

lol. lmao even.

(Also a short version.)

Life is entropy, I guess. Sorry if that adds an unneeded existential crisis to what you’re already dealing with, but it’s the truth. Stable systems/conditions are a myth.

Yeah, but some conditions are less unstable than others. I don't mind so much participating in something that has a decent chance of being radically different - or dead - in ten years. In one year? That's... a level of instability that is much less appealing.

Absolute stability might be a myth, but there's still a difference between modern Finland and Sengoku Jidai Japan.

I know you said you don’t have another migration in you, and I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. But if you ever change your mind, sopuli seems pretty chill. I honestly don’t know much about it, but that’s exactly what I mean. I’ve literally never seen or heard anything from the sopuli admins. For all I know they don’t even exist. They do of course, somewhere in the background, but they’re very hands-off. I think they’re based in Finland.

Honestly, my move to Lemmy.world was only out of the hope that Kbin's demise might be temporary. I'm... in general averse to instances using Lemmy, not because of admins, but because of the devs. Even right now, there's a massive banner of the genocide-denying fascist devs of Lemmy begging for money on Sopuli.

My move from Piefed is based on my user experience (and, to a lesser degree, the user experience of others, which will likely inhibit growth and the long-term health of the system). My move from Lemmy was fundamentally on moral grounds - I'd prefer to minimize the help I give to fascists like the devs, even indirectly.

I've certainly never heard anything bad about the Sopuli admins, but I'm definitely not moving back to a Lemmy instance.

The Piefed vote limit fundamentally screws my own user experience into a deeply frustrating one. Many of my upvotes are towards comments and replies on my own posts, so being unable to interact with a large number of my notifications, beyond some comment like "Thank you!" that becomes asinine after the 15th time or so in a day, makes my experience incredibly shitty.

If you're asking "Why not migrate your account but keep the comms on Piefed.social?", then the issue remains, it's just less obvious on my end. The vote limiting in Piefed.social affects non-Piefed.social users; the instance would simply not count a, for example, Piefed.world PugJesus vote after the daily limit was hit. I could split my votes between multiple accounts, but I'm not sanguine that that won't be coded against in a future update; and it also, again, makes my user experience shittier.

... as well as doubts as to how this will effect the long-term trajectory of Piefed.social, including its longevity, and a desire to not have comms I run on a self-sabotaging instance that will damage both the comms' health and potentially end with me having to migrate from a Kbin-esque collapse anyway at a later date.

You’ll be greatly missed. Thanks for everything.

If votes were made public, then people could make informed decisions on whether to block the top voters - up or down. Votes are inherently public data anyway, just hidden from view by most interfaces.

Alternately, we already have an Attitude score, just add a new Engagement score to highlight people who engage more vs. less? If people want to block users who engage a ton with posts, they can again make an INFORMED DECISION as to whether they want to do so.

As it is now though, PieFed hides downvotes (merging them together with upvotes), blocks lemvotes.org to hide all voting data from PieFed.social, and now full-on throws these additional contributions into the garbage bin. All of which would be fine, if they had been transparently performed. However, I note the language of "Newbie friendly: Yes" for Piefed.social at https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser, which would seem to imply that someone coming in from Reddit could readily adopt this as their social media platform? The truth though is that they need to read a fair bit about the culture and various sub-cultures here, and most importantly read the unwritten rules, like how this is not aimed to be a social media replacement (which is HUGE news to me btw!!!), and instead... I dunno exactly, but maybe it's aiming to become a Mastodon replacement? Or an old-school forum board one, just federated? It can be whatever it wants, but IMHO it needs to actually SAY WHAT THAT IS, or else risk immense disappointment when people find out the hard way.

As PugJesus did, though many others now will be spared that, by avoiding PieFed in the future?

And I need to face facts myself: we are a Linux forum, and we will never be anything else. I've gone back to Reddit over the last couple of days and rediscovered what having CONTENT is like!! Whole swaths of events happening in the world that you never hear so much as a whisper about here. Rarely - I could count on one or two hands - you see someone sharing true OC like a comic artist, but the vast majority of "content" in this place seems to just be circle-jerking. Do you think I am wrong in these musings? The ONE thing that (I thought) it had going for it was it being more open and welcoming. And maybe some instances - like blahaj - still are, but PieFed.social seems to be signaling HARD that it is not interested in "fluff", and now wants to be serious (like Mastodon), despite having next to no actual content to offer in that regard? I desperately wish that I am wrong here...

Unironically, it might take such a mindset to see the world, ask "what if it were THIS way instead?", and then go out and MAKE that change happen.

Dessalines had it, and we all benefitted from him making the Threadiverse, even though his ideology would like nothing more than to see every single person living in a Western civilization to (literally) die. Still, kudos for not simply rolling over and taking it up the ass from Reddit, and instead making something better. Or that one day will become better - even if exceedingly slowly.

And Rimu as well: it takes guts to ignore what people say to simply "accept the status quo", and be the change we'd like to see in the world. That said, I don't agree with every decision made there by far, and I fear that this authoritarian mindset is going to get the project killed off. Like, it's good to stick to your guns when you KNOW that you are CORRECT, but to do it just on a whim... yeah it hits entirely differently then.

There was also Ernst of Kbin, but it basically died off already. Yes Mbin exists but with participant numbers that make it a tiny footnote in the description of the Threadiverse more than a major player.

What's another good instance that isn't Lemmy and backed by tankies?

Beehaw