After a couple days of discussions about the newly implemented vote quota, I’m kinda exhausted. It seems like a situation we won’t ever agree on. Me personally, I don’t want to argue like this over a piece of software that I have high regards for. It tears us apart, where we should work together.
It’s okay if there is a quota on piefed.social the instance.
It’s not okay if there is a default quota of 240 on PieFed the software - and thus for all instances.
I suggest it should be implemented like this:
- It should not be a default value
- It should be an empty input in the admin interface, where instance admins can set a vote quota if they want to, or leave it empty to disable the vote quota.
- The /about page should display the set vote quota.
That way all instances can decide for themselves and users can see the instances’ vote quota transparently.
It looks like it yeah: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335 - all votes, even those cast from Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc. would be filtered, it would seem? But don’t take this as authoritative on my part: I have not studied the code personally.
If I’m reading that right (my Python is rusty and this is the first I’ve seen of the PieCode), then yeah, it seems only
VOTE_QUOTAamount of my votes would be received by Piefed users.Pardon my French, but that’s horseshit lol.
Imagine if you were on an instance that allowed 500 daily votes, but then PieFed.social only federated in the first 240 of them. Along with every single other instance that uses PieFed software and does not override the default settings. Maybe some instances will choose to allow 1000? Others 100? Still others unlimited? This is like defederation: it complicates the entire process of sending and receiving messages using the ActivityPub Protocol to implement the Threadiverse ideal.
And PieFed.social with its 240 daily vote quota is no tiny instance!! It matters to the Threadiverse overall what THIS instance in particular does!!!
Worse though, none of the instances are going to say what their particular settings are. New users would be impacted, except they cannot see what those settings are so cannot make decisions based upon any reliable source of facts. This will lead to fewer incoming users overall, at a time when the Threadiverse is already in decline.
There was a good idea buried somewhere in this implementation, but it was extremely poorly executed. What should have been an opt-in feature, fully implemented before being put on prod, and transparently explained, was instead haphazardly done, and the Fediverse overall will feel its impact for years to come.
I read through some other links you dropped in another post and, yeah, there’s a good idea in there somewhere but it seems like it would be better handled case-by-case if vote manipulation is suspected.
I’m also not really buying the “These accounts control what you see” argument, especially given how many people simply browse by “new” where the score doesn’t matter for ranking at all. I don’t say that to suggest an ulterior motive, but simply that the problem seems blown way out of proportion and the solution feels poorly thought out and hamfisted.
I agree with you, and I think this change, and especially making it opt out instead of opt in, is just blatant vote manipulation and is actively making me not want to be here. I will likely migrate back to Lemmy since at least I can upvote and downvote without shady limits.
I really liked Piefed, but I just cannot support this. If the developers want to control what I see, then I’m out. There are other ways to solve this if they think there is BOTing, but even Rimu admits they don’t think it’s users with BOTs. Plus, I also sort by new like you mention, so other people voting doesn’t even affect me or my feed.
I can’t tell if this is a well-meaning, but badly implemented idea, or if this is a grudge against the most active members of our communities, but I can’t just assume the best anymore.
Just an FYI if you want to stay on piefed, .zip has removed the limit and generally the admins are great :)
Wouldn’t the outside user’s vote only be filtered on piefed.social if the outside user had also voted more than 240 times that day?
Or are you suggesting that a piefed.social user receiving a vote also contributes to that piefed user’s limit?
The former, one presumes, according to the code.
Then, based on the data, piefed.social would only potentially filter out the votes of a couple hundred people, which wouldn’t be noticeable.
There is SO much more to this than how many people are directly filtered. For one, should consent matter? The lack of transparency surrounding the roll-out of this feature is very bad.
Consider this thought experiment: let’s assume that Rimu makes 99.8% of all contributions to the codebase for PieFed. Now, obviously this is the very epitome of “unfair”, therefore it follows that in order to achieve equity, his contributions must be limited, so that they are more in line with the level of his peers, correct?
Except… why would we want that? His contributing to the expansion of the Threadiverse benefits all of us - even those on Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. These contributions are “GOOD”, and others should contribute MORE, rather than him contribute LESS. Also, we ALL have the same ability to contribute sourcecode - ultimately we can make our own implementation of the ActivityPub Protocol, or even a fork of the very same PieFed project.
When did votes become a “bad” thing? And more importantly why did nobody tell us that this was coming? This comes across as an arbitrary and casual change that affects every one of us across the entire Threadiverse, which afaik was not announced on a roadmap somewhere or represents a decision made in agreement with everyone else’s principles. And even then, it’s worthwhile oftentimes to stick to one’s guns when you KNOW for CERTAIN that you are CORRECT - but nobody seems to understand this decision, so that seems not to be the case here (at the very least the communication around this topic would have massively beneficial to have been considered in advance).
This will help ensure that the Threadiverse remains an inconsequential footnote in the larger culture, as it justifies people’s decisions to avoid us here. Why would an actual content creator bother with such a tiny audience, when the capriciousness of the admins could wreak havoc on their world at any moment? … as it just did for PugJesus. Stories like this have a way of resonating, and will help convince those on the fence to avoid this place.
This is bad for us all. Worse, I don’t think it is fixable.
“First they came for…” - neither I nor you may be one of the couple hundred people directly affected (presuming your numerical inference there is correct), but I promise you that we are affected indirectly to some kind of a degree, whether very large or just medium I don’t know, but either way this event represents something that is POTENTIALLY quite profound.