Hell yeah.

The issue with PieFed is that it is “opinionated”. First, most of that is disinformation that the original people refused to correct (last I checked) even after being demonstrably proven wrong, like the main dev Rimu literally showed screenshots of the code to prove that it wasn’t “hard-coded” as they had claimed, but nobody cared. In-group (Lemmy, as in those on the main disinformation spreading platform Lemmy.ml)=good, while out-group (choosing to see PieFed as their “opponent”, despite VEHEMENT claims previously that we all should just try to get along in the Threadiverse and that Lemmy should not be singled out to be criticized in any way, a classic case of one rule for me while a different rule for thee)=bad.

Beyond the disinformation though, the software truly is opinionated. Every such feature is at worst opt-out, and most are even opt-in, but the lack of transparency about the disclosure (vaguely similar to the Tesseract dev scenario as you mentioned, although that one was to an extreme degree) definitely turns people off. Admins of multiple instances were suddenly surprised by the vote quota, not realizing what was happening on their own machines, as this MAJOR structurally breaking and exceedingly poorly and incompletely implemented “feature” was dropped like a bomb onto them, yet with barely any mention, buried like literally 20 items deep into a very long listing along with minutiae - almost like the software didn’t just implement a shadow-censoring change that rejects contributions from both people on the same instance that the community is located on plus EVEN LEMMY (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) but WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. All because the main dev had an itch to scratch, and then rammed it through despite everyone pushing back majorly in the chats, and despite some VERY well-known and most highly-active contributors on the entire Threadiverse quitting the platform in protest. And then most telling of all is how he responded to people asking about it - note the title of that post is “Upvotes turn green but number doesn’t change”, i.e. this “anti-feature” is causing bugs left and right, breaks the entire model of the ActivityPub Protocol and existing modes of how the Threadiverse has worked until now, and Rimu’s response is that he felt (no evidence btw, see his linked post that fails to demonstrate the premise, as everyone in its comment section agrees) that people were voting too much, so he took that right away, citing how the end-users need to simply “Get creative” and live with the suddenly and only partially implemented and barely announced anti-feature, seemingly created on a whim with no advanced or even current notice as it was being rolled out, and against the advice of pretty much everyone, with the best case scenario being that people are mainly neutral (except like one prominent supporter, but notably I only counted one, vs. like a veritable MOUNTAIN of push-back!!).

So understandably, this kills people’s enthusiasm and worse yet, their hopes that PieFed could be the future of the Threadiverse. One reason for that is that the Lemmy devs are quite opinionated themselves, and have been known to do similarly in the past - e.g. when they implemented an English word slur word filter, which they ACTUALLY did hard-code right in (most of the detractors of PieFed seem to keep claiming that PieFed did this, which it did not, but in contrast Lemmy actually did do that at one point in time), and then moreover adamantly refused to change it, telling people to simply fork the code if they did not like it. Tbf, they did later relent on this and made the feature able to be disabled with an option.

And that is one thing notable about the kind-hearted Rimu: this extremely unpopular and not transparently disclosed at all anti-feature of having implementing a vote quota was made to be opt-out. It would have been better to have made it opt-in, better still to have told people about it properly, even better still to have listened to all the advice and simply not done it at all, especially until it could be done properly, but at least he took the effort to make it able to be easily disabled, by an environmental variable controllable outside of the docker container. That is not nothing. (Edit: I mean to say that it is rather the opposite of nothing: it demonstrates a consideration for the needs of others who may have different viewpoints than the dev - i.e. even while being opinionated, it is not to the same degree as how Lemmy’s slur word filter was handled. Both were imperfect, but managed differently.)

Back to the Lemmy devs now: the software seems equally opinionated to me, although more in the sense of features that it refuses to implement, than in features that it does. e.g. Reddit has no modlog but it does have a modmail, and notifications to the user that their content was moderated, and the ability for anyone with the link to continue to see and even converse in a deleted post. PieFed has roughly half of these features, but Lemmy has zero of them. Lemmy is quite authoritarian in its design philosophy - it offers supreme power to an instance admin (even the ability to hide events from the modlog), somewhat less so to community moderators, but very little to none at all to individual end-users. Like why did the devs decide not to even so much as notify users that they have been banned from an entire instance or community, instead leaving them to find out the hard way? May glorious leader live forever!! The power differential there is extreme - even people using Reddit are granted more rights (e.g. to be notified of removed content) than users of Lemmy?

I am tired of making excuses for Lemmy, as if it will ever get any better. It’s been over three years since the Rexodus and I’ve seen some features actively get worse - e.g. after you banned an entire instance, the people thus “banned” used to not be able to send you DMs and trigger notifications, but then the devs claimed that was confusing and added the ability for these BANNED users to send you DMs and thereby harass you as much as they please from newly-created troll accounts. Lemmy software truly sucks in so many ways.

And recently I am also now tired of defending PieFed as well, after the shadow-censorship of implementing a vote quota without telling anyone or listening to feedback.

But at least both are FOSS, both are free, both provide an alternative to corporate enshittification, while each adding their own forms of enshittification, and each helps people get away from the corporate Algorithm, while substituting that for our own versions of undisclosed Algorithmic control.

And yes, people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. See e.g. my very own reply right now, daring to criticize the devs providing us all with free software, emo-venting my fee-fees all over the place, mixing it together with facts and hopefully not but potentially some anti-facts as well (please do correct me if you see that I am wrong!). Whatever software platform someone is on, I would hope that we would always try to remember the human.