this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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WHAT?!*
Mate, who the hell cares about minor shizzle like that. Are you serious...?
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.
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..?
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.
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.
Because it has a bizarre, but coherent, justification that suggests outright hostility towards 'power users'.
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).
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'.
Thanks!
(pardon, I've been... more out of it than usual, recently)
(like, emergency room out of it, haha)
Huh. Are we really defining "power users" as ones who vote a whole bunch every day? Because I'd never in a million years chance on that angle.
Here I profess ignorance, as I was unaware if there was an announcement schedule for upcoming features. Actually that sounds good, in theory. Get some early-feedback and such.
That's not quite true as I understand it. No, I do believe the changes directly help with the stated goals of keeping down vote-brigading / botting and such. That's some important shizzle that needs to happen no matter the implementation.
For sure I didn't realise that some here hit their vote limit, but what are the metrics on that? Is it maybe better for the cap to be lifted in to a sort of zone that meets both requirements? PF as an active project maintained by a single dev (thank you), seems like something at the very least to work with instead of just... yeah.
PJ, is just possible that you keeping up the unholy pace of contributing amazing content here on a daily basis possibly weared on you over time? Personally I know it's been for me, altho I work in a different format. But three years is a hell of a long time to contribute to a free internet project intended for the public good.
I have never needed this current break more than I do right now, for a variety of reasons.
Power users are those who use a system a disproportionately large amount. Rimu explicitly said it was because the distribution of activity between the most active users (ten or so of us, if memory serves) and the majority.
This is not actually unusual in any online community, but it was apparently worth Rimu's ire, even after being advised against it by several people, including a fellow Fediverse admin.
Rimu explicitly said that he didn't think that the top ten users who he was targeting were bots or coordinated. Furthermore, as other people have pointed out, it's trivially easy to set up a bot to circumvent the voting limit. The only people this punishes are people who are actually interested in interacting with the Fediverse on one account - in other words, the people least likely to be bots or bad actors.
I don't know about the metrics, but I noted in my goodbye thread numerous users whose 'vote quota' bars were filled up. Most of them weren't Piefed.social users, so they won't even be aware that their votes are being rejected by Piefed.social. Their vote is shadow-banned, in a sense.
What 'other requirement' is there, if the problem was not and has never been botting or bad actors? The only two justifications offered by Rimu have been that it's a 'bad use' of 'the commons' for people to vote so much; and that a small number of users should not make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse's activity.
No, not at all. Fact is, I miss it terribly, even only a week out. I miss posting much more than voting and browsing, even. But I'm also not going to be half-in and half-out, generating content but stripped of the ability to interact with the content of others on my own terms - terms that I've been interacting on for the past three years, and that has never been a problem - in any instance - until now. "I upvote what I like" is apparently no longer acceptable on Piefed.social, if you're online 'too much'.
Dammit, much of this is just over my head, and I want to support you as well as Rimu in order to find a way through.
But, here-- are you really saying that the whole idea of vote-capping was nothing but a fraud for... who knows what real reasons..?
Not a 'fraud', in any way. Just a bad decision, and possibly poorly thought out in addition.
I know nothing about the technical side, though the fact that Rimu pivoted to a different explanation when pressed has me skeptical. But it very well could be that voting uses up some significant amount of 'the commons' in federating votes. I suspect the actual impact is minimal, though, considering that Piefed.social is the only instance that has even broached the issue, so far as I know, in the three years I've been on the Fediverse. And, as mentioned before, it's trivial to 'get around', resulting in the same vote-federation burden as large numbers of votes with one account.
The other explanation offered by Rimu, which I regard as much more likely, is Rimu's claim that it's in some way unfair for a small number of users to make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse's activity. I take him at his word on this - I think he genuinely believes that. No fraud involved. Just a view that power users are some form of 'influencer' whose activity is undesirable because it 'sways' the community towards the opinions of the most active users.
Rimu, I suspect, thinks that cutting down the tall poppies will just create a more even distribution. Instead, I suspect, it will either result in the former distribution proportion reasserting itself, just with a lower cap and a lower average (thus requiring another reduction of the cap, to ensure a small number of users don't 'dominate' the activity - repeat ad infinitum, or until the instance is dead); or the 'more even' distribution being significantly lower in general from decreased activity, as the core function of social media - interaction with others - generates more activity from others as a knock-on effect. It's self-feeding.
Or self-starving, in this case.
Well, I'm too weak and sick to try to zoom in with my traditional power-glove diplomacy, so what do you figure you'll do then, mate?
Oof, I followed you and Blaze to PF.S from Lemm.ee, and now it's yet another bloody-well disaster. This is just a bit much.
Seriuously, I have so much stuff queued upon in my archives that I was looking to post on your communities as a personal thanks. Really only had 1-2wks left to sort it all, fuckitall.
As I said in the post.
I'm leaving. I'm out. This is it for me.
I just don't have the energy to undertake another instance migration with all my comms.
I'll go back to doomscrolling Tumblr and playing more games, I suppose.
Well then fuck my life.
I cannot tell you how fun & interesting it was trying to add on to your posts and/or provoke questions, accordingly. And you were an amazing sport upon such..!
I love history and animal facts to death, so of course, please leave your T# address?
Sorry about my original reply on this one, mate. It sucked.
Damn, I certainly can't imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?
I mean, sure I suspect I'm like you and others, giving a friendly updoot upon loads of stuff that I was only neutral upon, but it was for the 'good' of the FV, but... 240x per day, y'all?
There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I'm almost at the cap.
~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.
Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day's output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn't take much browsing to hit 240 votes.
Alright, you're right.
I'd forgotten about the post / comment type of vote.
Yes, of course you're right.
(altho that's still a lot voting, mate!!)
I wonder... is there a technical difference upon such votes across ActivityPub/Fediverse?
Sure, but it's maybe two hours of browsing. I don't browse for two hours every day, but when I do, I would like to not be frustrated by the experience.