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.
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.