Honestly, as I said elsewhere, I could do it if it was just my user profile. Communities are the real issue. Building up activity to the point where I'm not always the only person posting takes months of constant activity, every time.

I just don't have it in me again.

Great, thank for the info :)

Ah, yeah somehow I was envisioning user profiles including communities and... yeah, anyways, I for sure get it. I helped get a bunch of communities started over on reddit back when I was in college, and these days I just don't have anything like the adderall free time that really requires. Much love for the work you already put in, your history posts really were a highlight of my mornings!

WHAT?!*
Mate, who the hell cares about minor shizzle like that. Are you serious...?

There are levels to it, I agree -- and your infamy outbounds my near non-existence, as does mine to those who merely lurk -- but if the level of discourse had an upper cap which easily contains the habits of a semi-active user, then I generally welcome it. I have a feeling that this impacts largely a minority of one.

Edit: Just to say - I greatly value the historical topics you post and the detail you go to in your posts. I feel like the quality of your posts can still happily thrive, even if the quantity is less than what you'd prefer

Peace, brethren. We need more like ya - and that's just the problem, getting communities to a critical mass in this medium is kind of unsustainable. Maybe we should go back to forums.

If we post a lot, why not

Okay, so you don't actually think I misinterpreted the vote quota, unlike your original objection.

Yet we are both the top posters but that’s not a good thing. I think that’s a good way to limit the power we have on the fediverse and let other people express their opinion.

Whose opinion am I preventing from being expressed? What finite resource is being used up?

Even if we know jot thing, share lot things, i wouldn’t mind if someone told me to slow down.

By making any comments at all, you're already in the top 1% of users. Wanna guess how high up you are by making almost (gasp) a whole comment a day?

I think you ought to be muzzled. For fairness sake, of course!

And i don’t know where you got this idea that it was different. Since the beggining piefed tell how much hour we are connected and have a blocklist on far right website.

What the fuck does that have to do with crippling your own growth and intentionally enshittifying the experience of your users?

I consider it as part of our wellness to limit use of our screentime. But maybe you need it much more than us to escape this reality and be with the people you love.

Hey. Father Knows Best, and users are just children, right? Us lowly users need to be told how much 'screen time' is 'appropriate' for us. Thanks, I'm so glad I'm being parented by a fucking admin while trying to destress from keeping my own life together and powering through local politics on enough anti-anxiety meds to kill a horse. Thanks for taking this from me, this will really improve my mental health. /s

I'm sorry I spend a few hours a day shitposting while I do other things, the same amount of time as it'd take to watch a movie, reading a few chapters of a book, or a few episodes of a TV show in the background. Clearly my crippled ass should be doing 'real person' things, like contact sports. And my friends should stop having 'lives' and 'schedules' and simply be available whenever I'm free (this I agree with, tbf, but is unlikely to come about).

That’s both the curse and the joy of free software. I alway moved to follow my value even thought i lose a lot everytime. In a sense that’s also why i dom’t blame reddit users, they have enough and don’t want to change. They just want to be there. Sorry if the recent change didn’t fit your need. I though a pylova account would be enough for you. :(

If you're so concerned about the 'average user', then maybe you should consider what less 'power users' making content will cause the 'average user' to do. That is to say, participate even less - or abandon the Fediverse entirely.

But hey, as long as you show those power users what-for, kneecapping your own project is a small price to pay, right?

Maybe you have an alternative idea to suggest but mind that’s not a post quota but a vote quota. Anyway, i understand if people desagree, i didn’t suggest it but i agree with the core idea, the reasons behind it. If there is a counterargument, i can my opinion.

"If there is a counterargument"?

Fuck, there are nothing but counterarguments.

"Why do we want to restrict participation when the Fediverse's core issue at present is low activity?"

"Why are we restricting something that does not consume a meaningfully limited resource and which is primarily oriented towards boosting the visibility of other content?"

"Why did we not take a basic class in statistics or do a quick fucking search for common activity distributions?"

"What benefit do we reasonably expect to see from this policy?"

A post quota was already proposed, and that's one of the reasons why I no longer trust Piefed.social. This isn't a one-off thing, this is an implementation of long-considered values.

I feel like critical mass is very much possible and sustainable in this medium. I remember watching Reddit communities hit critical mass, and it was generally similar to the curve here, just on a faster scale.

The issue is the instability, and the instability is largely because of poor planning (God love Ernest, and I hear he's doing better health-wise now, but he shouldn't have been running the instance basically solo to begin with) and decisions.

Oh, whoops...

You can’t leave: Adrian Zenz and Radio Free Asia need your help to keep the faith.

but if the level of discourse had an upper cap which easily contains the habits of a semi-active user, then I generally welcome it.

Again, your commenting far outstrips that of a semi-active user. Perhaps you should be advocating for a comment limit based on the average user as well.

You should probably advocate for a post limit based on the average poster too. Wouldn't want it to be unfair, after all. And posts are MUCH more visible than votes or comments.

I have a feeling that this impacts largely a minority of one.

It was geared towards the muzzling of ten 'top' users (10, mind you, is some ~2% of the daily users of Piefed.social to begin with), but under the presumption that their votes are evenly spread out, day-by-day.

In reality, most people aren't on the Fediverse every day - they come in, participate in a discussion or three, and then might not be back for a few days. So it's easy to hit the limit, as it is a daily limit, simply by being active in a discussion.

Keep complaining to management, truth warrior 🤣

Whilst I sense the sarcasm of your tone, I do largely agree that post and comment caps would likely dampen the effect of overactive subs (filtering out political posts by curating my subscriptions is a chore...)

I do agree that a daily limit might be too much, as activity does seem to be sporadic as you say. A weekly limit could work though.

Anyway, to get to the crux of it: I'd be sad if you leave, but not sad if you posted a little less

Whilst I sense the sarcasm of your tone, I do largely agree that post and comment caps would likely dampen the effect of overactive subs (filtering out political posts by curating my subscriptions is a chore…)

... most of those political posts aren't done by the same people. They're 'overactive' because many Fediverse users are heavily political. So limiting the number of individual user posts or comments would do jack shit for that.

Anyway, to get to the crux of it: I’d be sad if you leave, but not sad if you posted a little less

Sorry that I want to participate in a community on my own terms. You won't have to worry about that frightening level of autonomy from me on here anymore.

Personally, I comment far more than I vote and I tend to agree with Rimu that a comment is far more engaging than a vote is. Still, I like receiving as many votes as I can when I do comment or post.

Oh shit I'll be sad to see you go

In general, I agree that a comment usually means more than a vote.

But that's not really the question here - the question here is whether restricting voting because some people vote 'too much' is in any way a reasonable point of view for an instance on the Threadiverse. As Rimu himself pointed out, the primary targets of this are ten 'top' voters, who are hardly going to be placing more comments to 'replace' their lost votes.

Assuming, of course, comments aren't next to be limited, since that's also an 'outsized influence' from a 'small minority'.

The instability is definitely a sour note. I don't disagree with your choices at all, for the record. I just feel like this format is probably better suited to being run by actual organisations, rather than loners with weird motives.

If there was a nonprofit org (or god forbid, an employee owned company) that ran a link aggregation platform, I'd see that as far more sustainable in human terms. It takes sysadmins, active moderators whose agenda is actually aligned with the mission of the platform, and dance commanders like you (is that a good word for it?) to bolster engagement and build community.

Just thinking out loud here, I'm not trying to talk you into anything or whatever. You deserve some extra free time.

It just worked when I started and it still just works.

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.

Yeah, I agree. Institutions running instances would be much more reliable. Unfortunately, we play the game with the cards we have, not the cards we want.

Yeah, at best you could frame this as an experiment in trying to keep things small. The conflicting reasoning given makes me think there wasn’t a terrible amount of forethought to this decision and perhaps it was guided more by a strong hunch.

Oh nonono, we do not authorize you to leave actually.

Quick! Let's build an iron curtain to contain him!

The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.

I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.

But... it was about a cap for those who chronically abused such..?

Man, I literally hit the cap before it was even announced. I went to the Matrix channel, confused as hell, and got told it was intentional.

The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.

The issue was not abuse, and Rimu didn't say it was abuse in that sense. The issue was always that Rimu doesn't think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.

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.

Your “evidence” is The Diplomat lamenting two years ago that the “genocide” was “fading away?” That they were losing the argument?

Keep fighting the good fight. Maybe you can convince Wikipedia to un-step back from its previous accusations. Maybe you can convince the UN to re-open the case they closed on the matter.

I for one do hope you come back, but I completely understand. I had to learn my own limits on involvement in social media to keep it from becoming an unpaid job

Rimu doesn’t think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.

So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev's time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?

All this on their own time, with hundreds of their free hours known and logged..?

Hosting instances by a nonprofit org definitely seems like a good idea, it's why after feddit.de happened feddit.org is now in the hands of the Fediverse Foundation

So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?

What?

At no point did I say that Rimu was right-wing in any sense or say that he shouldn't have offered an explanation?

This is a shitty administration decision, it will have shitty effects on the instance long-term, and, especially, it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I'm not willing to put up with. That's it.

Honestly, only HistoryRuins/InhabitedBeauty really felt joblike (and I only started those because I couldn't find where to put a handful of cool pictures - and then didn't want the comms to die of inactivity, so I kept up the daily posting DX), and to a lesser degree, Shermanposting (mostly because I started to run dry and had to search ever-deeper for new Sherman memes XD), and HistoryArtifacts insofar as I fucking hate sourcing but recognize that you kind of have to with artifacts.

Everything else, I loved doing, honestly.

But I can't do it even on the comms I enjoy posting in with low feedback all over again. The conversations are one of the best parts of posting. I could do this as-is for three more years, but... I can't start from scratch again. That is too joblike.

I did it the first three times because I wanted to help the Fediverse grow, but... a guy's got limits, unfortunately.

it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I’m not willing to put up with.

Okay, sorry if I misunderstood.
But, I guess I just... don't understand why the PF dev experimenting with voter caps is such a major issue?!

This is easily the most baffling reaction I've ever seen across the Fediverse.

Thanks for the explanation, will you just stop using one all together? Or are you going to a different kind of place?

The main problem with the slur filter is that it does neither consider context, nor considers delimiters. For example, when someone were to say the word for the purple fruit used to make wine, they're not intending to use a word for the non-consensual sexual violation, yet the algorithm can't see the difference when it detects the UTF-8 sequence 0x72 0x61 0x70 0x65, doing a hard-replace with the substring "removed" regardless of the context. Tom Scott once made a video about this phenomenon: it's called String("The Sc" + "unthorpe problem").Also, as you can see through this reply of mine, filters are pointless when there's a plethora of ways to say the same thing without saying the actual word. Naive filters (e.g. RegExp-based match and replace) will just curb those who aren't creative and/or knowledgeable enough, while affecting the experience for everyone who aren't intending to do slurs, leading them to start using coded language and, thus, making it even harder to detect slurs as the slurers will eventually learn, through the non-slurers, that they can express the same thing without triggering the filter, until we get to a point in which the entire platform pivots to AI moderation, and even then there's so many ways to express the thing without the LLM detecting, it's called "steganography" and curbing this requires technical approaches known to be a Hard NP problem in computer science.!fedimemes@feddit.uk

Thank you for making fediverse so much more enjoyable all this time. Sad to see you leave, but totally understandable.

Maybe you can convince the UN to re-open the case they closed on the matter.

You mean this one?

Keep simping for the regime that stonewalls UN investigators; after all, bootlicking is all Nazi scumbags like you know how to do.

I'll probably go back to doomscrolling Tumblr and the like. I was a lurker on Reddit for years - while I don't intend to go back to Reddit, lurking is what my social media consumption was before the Fediverse, and it seems that is probably what it will be after.

1. Because it has a bizarre, but coherent, justification that suggests outright hostility towards 'power users'.

2. Because it was dropped suddenly, without warning or prior suggestion that it was in any way incoming, to the point where other Piefed instance admins were surprised by its introduction (as an opt-out feature, not opt-in).

3. Because it enshittifies the user experience of active accounts for no real gain. Shit, man, several users here, in this very thread, hit the vote limit. The ones who are on non-Piefed.social accounts probably won't realize that their subsequent votes aren't being counted by Piefed.social because they 'voted too much'.

I concur, piefed.zip has been my home since lemm.ee went down and so far so good!

This might make sense if we didn't get only one vote per post/comment.

Thank you for everything you've done, and for your history posts, I always looked forward to seeing them. The fediverse will be a grayer place without your posts.

I'm sorry if this misses you, but your memes and wonderful breakdowns of history always made me smile. Thank you for everything.

Is your point seriously that the people who aren't active don't influence the the fediverse as much as people who are?

That's really weird, and if you just think about that for a minute you should see why that's weird.

Like, imagine there's an election and the board of elections was suddenly like "welp, according to this chart, a lot of registered voters don't regularly vote, so it's unfair to let some voters who vote in every election have a disproportionate impact on the election results. Therefore, we're canceling voting."

I'm sorry to see you go but I understand why you feel you need to leave. We'll miss you around these parts. Take care PugJesus!

My federated social network is ruined.

if a minority of 40% can dictate an election outcome over the remaining 60%, some of whom didn't vote - that's not democracy, that's First-Past-The-Post, and I don't need to bring up british politics to explain why that doesn't work.

I even recommend it to people who are adamant about not switching from their existing Lemmy accounts

indeed. that's what I do as well.

Maybe you can try to convey the controversy

I most probably will not if I'm recommending it for people new to the threadiverse. If they ask, then I may explain. Although I might forget honestly. Same with the lemmy controversy. I only remembered because you and others reminded me of it in replies of this post.

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

It does indeed. I recently tried a few apps again. I am still using Summit but want to see how the others handle it, but for piefed. None of them, including Summit, does onboarding as well as piefed on a web browser.

I seem to have misunderstood what you meant in your edit paragraph

Yeah, it's a tongue in cheek comment. I agree with you that if an instance stating they are disabling whatever votes upfront isn't being manipulative. It's transparent and honest, so people can make their own informed decision.

It's just that I don't remember downvoting being disabled on piefed.social because I can downvote just fine. Maybe those are all posts in comms that are not in piefed.social and I just never encountered piefed.social posts in my subscribed feed much. Can a comms mod set votes turned on or off on piefed instances?

I just am still gobsmacked that Rimu decided to put on brakes by default and opt-out function to the threadiverse growth. We are having trouble as it is getting just users, and retaining them, not to mention getting and retaining quality active posters and lurkers. The worst thing about it is that they didn't discuss it in a more public manner before the decision. What a weird opinionated action.