This will in no way come back to “haunt” us…

I think that was already rolled into the third bullet.

Sounds like a problem for someone else / some other day.

• them

Only in Australia 🦘

I mean, except, you know, for it being the very bedrock foundation for all of STEM.

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!)