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I feel like we’re having two separate conversations.
What the Lemmy devs do with their instance is separate from what they do with their software, imo.
I’ve said this many times before but as I see it we have two bad choices:
Lemmy, whose devs are arguably questionable with worrysome personal politics and philosophy but who do not bake said philosophy into their software.
Or Piefes, whose devs are arguably much more acceptable and well-meaning, but who bakes their social philosophy into their software.
To me, these are both bad options, but I’ll pick the side that develops agnostically without nannying tendencies. That they chose to enact stricter political bounds within their home territory is irrelevant to me because I don’t spend time there and that feels well within their rights without encroaching on the autonomy of others, to me.
Or, in short: I don’t care even a little bit about Lemmy.ml, I only care about Lemmy.
But as OpenStars pointed out, the Lemmy devs did just such a thing in a much more egregious (hard-coded) way previously. The slur filter is now optional after considerable time and outcry.
Piefed’s vote restriction is an option that admins of any instance can fiddle with, or, effectively, disable entirely. Like the slur filter currently in Lemmy, and thus less forced than the slur filter as it was initially rolled out on Lemmy. The issue, for me, is that I made a home on Piefed.social, specifically, and now it’s… not home for me.
If you don’t care about what admins do on their own instance, this shouldn’t bother you. I care - both in the abstract and insofar as it affects me, and so am… winding down my participation.
If it sounded like what I was trying to say was “PugJesus should have just picked and stuck with Lemmy!”, then I apologize, because that is enormously not what I’m trying to say.
If anything I’m saying I understand your frustration and was just lamenting a lack of a good solution, and attempting to point to the insufficiency of all available options.
I only targeted towards Piefed because of the kind of “kumbuya” idealists that claim it’s superior while being blind to its flaws.
I don’t disagree with you, your frustrations, or your decision to step away rather than re-invest somewhere with another shaky foundation
I didn’t take you as saying that.
I’m just saying that there isn’t a difference here between the slur filter as is and the vote limiter as is in terms of implementing philosophy into the software. Both are options for admins in the software, not mandatory.
The Lemmy devs, however, initially attempted to make the slur filter mandatory, meaning that their attempt to implement their philosophy into the software was much more heavy-handed, and only walked-back after considerable outcry.
Basically, Rimu’s choice here is immensely shitty, but is fundamentally more a choice of Rimu as an admin than as a dev. As a dev choice, the voting limit is of questionable utility, but not forced on instances - it’s a number that admins can easily (effectively) abolish.
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.