Certainly. Don’t know how large and when, but a significant (relative to our size) bunch of people would likely show up. That plus people who dabble in both would increase their activity here. The threadiverse is more or less guaranteed to grow and form a solid contrubutor base. We don’t seek to increase profits YoY so our services are only going to get better over time. For-profit socials have to grow profits over time, so they are going to get worse. Increase in service quality for for-profit platforms is a temporary stage of their development. The threadiverse will be around in 5-10 years time, in some shape or form and it’ll be larger and better than it is today. This is why I keep pushing the vote buttons and type words every day. Deliberately spending more time than I’d like. 😄
our numbers have been actively decreasing since the Rexodus - from 60k at our peak down to ~35k now
PieFed now shadow-censors all votes with a daily vote quota, thereby limiting such interactions
Not everything always moves in a positive line. We might improve here, especially if we put in the efforts to do so, but it is not assured, especially without having put in such efforts.
mostly because people keep trying to go to smaller and smaller platforms. ee, was one of the large instances to disappear and almost everyone scattered so theres less people overall even contributing to lemmy,.
The size of the platform and degree of scatteredness are both kinda irrelevant when all content is shared between all of them. For there to be less content, there would have to be fewer people overall, which the stats show is the case actually - down from our peak of ~65k users after the Rexodus, which was already quite small to begin with.
Good question. There is a lot of active disinformation circulating about PieFed - like it supposedly “hard-coded” certain filters into it, which btw it does the precise opposite of that, not only not hard-coding those but actually making them opt-in, the absolute most friendly and non-mandatory that a code option could be. The main author Rimu argues back against such in his blog post at https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/14/open-source-runs-on-good-faith/.
All that said, the daily vote quota criticism unfortunately is for real. Unlike all the false criticism before that, this one is opt-out rather than opt-in, forcing admins to be aware that it even exists and then figure out a calculation to determine a value that would effectively disable it (which tbf is not hard at all, if someone is aware of its existence). Instance admins were apparently given no notice, expressing surprise at the behavior of their instances after an update that barely mentioned it and rhen buried it deeply in a long list as if it were nothing. Also this anti-feature was rammed through despite somewhat strong criticism, for reasons that seem to make sense to the author and at least one other person but make little sense to the rest of us (i.e. no attempt at reaching consensus or striving for buy-in among stakeholders, at least least not a successful one, and at least as far as I have been able to ascertain).
Briefly, PieFed has decided that by default, unless an instance admin goes out of their way to request otherwise, voting now is limited. Which is arguably fine if it were internal, except this applies to votes received by accounts across the entire wide Fediverse - from Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, little to no indication of that fact is provided - votes simply are discarded, leaving people to wonder why, and Rimu’s response was to get creative in finding alternatives to voting. Votes are (according to him) not meant to make people feel good, but strictly to influence the visibility of an item of content (which ofc makes a LOT of sense, at least in pure theoretical terms) hence it was decided - AGAINST a large outcry from the community - that it was “unfair” that people who use the platform a lot can cause more influence than others.
Many counterexamples were put forth - e.g. a doctor or nurse working days as 12+ hr rather than 8 hr shifts, then wanting to relax and consume Threadiverse content on their rest day, but being blocked from doing so by the quota being strictly a daily one. PieFed thus now imposes restrictions on the style that people use the platform by. Numerous alternatives could have been done - e.g. banning people who purely vote thousands of times yet never write comments, or conversely allow people who do write posts and comments and not merely moderate but put in enormous efforts to actively grow up communities to have a higher limit than those who do not. But instead… everyone has the same (daily) restriction on votes allowed to be received by a community on an instance that implements this restriction.
And again, as evidenced partly by the fact that you are not familiar with this aspect of PieFed: the discoverability of this anti-feature is exceedingly poor. PieFed is currently shadow-censoring votes coming in from other platforms (e.g. Lemmy) without telling them why.
Here is PugJesus’ goodbye message citing his reason to leave the Threadiverse as the implementation of this vote quota along with prior hints that the PieFed software is becoming quite opinionated, in a manner that is accepting of serious discussions but high critical of meme and shitposting styles, i.e. the more “social media” style. So it’s not that PieFed is “bad” here, but it is opinionated and pushing its own agenda, more and more lately, which can still be mitigated by instance admins but with features being opt-out rather than opt-in, PieFed is becoming increasingly less friendly towards the traditional “social media” style of conversation, and is imposing its own vision of what might be better. And again, without really disclosing that fact much where people can see an acknowledgement that it is currently happening.
Here is a post directly from Rimu about the bias underlying the change to implement the vote quota. And here is the OG release announcement, showing this feature buried in the list. Here is a community push-back that lead to what I consider a fascinating technical exploration of the topic, and another one.
If this has been released as merely another opt-in feature, and affected merely votes internally to a PieFed instance, then everything would be different. But instead, people are still sore at Huffman trying to tell us that we are landed gentry, and this change smacks of a similar situation whereby despite the lack of corporate enshittification, nonetheless the people in charge are telling others what they can and cannot do, for opaque reasons that don’t resonate with seemingly much of anyone.
I’ve noticed a drop off in several communities on PieFed.social since, and people saying that they wanted to migrate their community or account but now have not.
Tbf if that’s what the instance admin wants it be - mainly for serious content rather than an open and welcoming space - that’s absolutely fine, it’s just a transparency issue where there seems a mismatch between what is said vs. the actual direction it is headed towards.
And I would have hoped that such an unpopular anti-feature would have been made as opt-in rather than opt-out.
I am particularly disappointed bc I put literally all of my hopes for the entire future of the Threadiverse itself into PieFed. Lemmy is developed by tankies, and as much as we here don’t care (software, particularly FOSS, is software), people on Reddit care greatly and eschew coming here as a result.
But now they won’t come here to merely a different, inferior version of Reddit, where one person in charge is replaced by another person.
This is all waaaay too simplistic ofc, as PieFed is still amazing software, and Rimu is truly nothing at all like Huffman. But… how much do facts actually matter, to most people?
This is going to harm our ability to draw people from Reddit to here. They are currently pissed about the shadow-banning there, and I don’t think that they will take kindly to the shadow-censoring here, even if it is limited to voting (but not posting or commenting). This place truly is better than here… but this decision opens up PieFed to that MAJOR criticism of the instance admins being landed gentry.
Fortunately - regardless of whether PieFed, Lemmy, or something else like Mbin is used - instance admins still are the arbitrators of what experience their users will encounter. And PieFed offers enormous benefits to spinning up a personal instance, plus under leadership that remains friendly to the social media style, PieFed still has enormous benefits to offer. Plus, obviously, some people even want the serious-content-only style, and will even welcome those changes (I would still argue that the transparency needs to be improved there… but otherwise the changes themselves are not so much “bad” as more surprising, being different than what people are used to, and therefore if not disclosed properly even dismaying?).
So yes, unfortunate, but we move forward regardless. Rimu still works hard at modifying the code as he sees fit, and like the Lemmy devs, offers it as FOSS - and I could ask for little more than that!:-)
PieFed instance admins can set a limit to how many votes each account can cast each day. I set the default value for this at a level that 99% of us will never reach.
This pissed off some of the 1% (or people who thought they were the 1% but weren’t) so they spent weeks spreading FUD about it.
That’s my bet for the reasons I outlined. It’s not a bet in vacuum. I think it’s strong enough to consider it “certain,” colloquially speaking. Is it certain in mathematical terms? No, as you said - nothing is certain.
That’s not inconsitent with my bet. We can get into why but probablt don’t need to.
No idea what that’s about, not using PieFed. They limit what? Why do they do that? I read your explanation.
E: BTW I’m not unaware of the ability of for-profits to siphon people away from existing corporate platforms into new corporate or corporate-adjacent platforms, for example. E.g. Twitter -> Bluesky. I think that would be insufficient in the long run to halt the fediverse growth because every time this cycle occurs, some people fall off into the fediverse and that’s usually the more aware people. They tend to create more content.
Most people either seem to be happy with the way things are and don’t even want to grow at all - certainly not “at all costs” - or else they naively think that we will grow merely bc Reddit sucks, with zero effort required beyond that. I am glad that you are aiming at a blend of optimistic realism.
Though in that case, #2 is where the heart of the issue lies: so very MANY people overcame all the hurdles, figured out how to use this place, created an account, even posted here for multiple years, only to leave and now bad-mouth us over on Reddit. Overwhelmingly the sentiment there whenever a community decides to migrate and people ask where should they go, and Lemmy is suggested, the response is “oh HELL NO!!!”
And ofc many more people don’t even make it as far as that - but people are willing to put in a lot of effort, when they see that there is VALUE in doing so. Hence, our reputation being so poor, deprives us in many more ways than just the one, if the goal was to grow.
And I honestly don’t think that we will actually. Maybe in 10 years yes, but not in 1-2. And I, like so many others, have made my peace with that. Especially bc we aren’t really willing to lift a finger to do anything about the main problem that plagues us here - again, our reputation on Reddit. So, we shall remain small (the direct and immediate consequence of that), since collectively that’s what we have decided to do, whether consciously or no.
Certainly. Don’t know how large and when, but a significant (relative to our size) bunch of people would likely show up. That plus people who dabble in both would increase their activity here. The threadiverse is more or less guaranteed to grow and form a solid contrubutor base. We don’t seek to increase profits YoY so our services are only going to get better over time. For-profit socials have to grow profits over time, so they are going to get worse. Increase in service quality for for-profit platforms is a temporary stage of their development. The threadiverse will be around in 5-10 years time, in some shape or form and it’ll be larger and better than it is today. This is why I keep pushing the vote buttons and type words every day. Deliberately spending more time than I’d like. 😄
This is simply not true.
nothing in life is ever fully “guaranteed”
our numbers have been actively decreasing since the Rexodus - from 60k at our peak down to ~35k now
PieFed now shadow-censors all votes with a daily vote quota, thereby limiting such interactions
Not everything always moves in a positive line. We might improve here, especially if we put in the efforts to do so, but it is not assured, especially without having put in such efforts.
mostly because people keep trying to go to smaller and smaller platforms. ee, was one of the large instances to disappear and almost everyone scattered so theres less people overall even contributing to lemmy,.
The size of the platform and degree of scatteredness are both kinda irrelevant when all content is shared between all of them. For there to be less content, there would have to be fewer people overall, which the stats show is the case actually - down from our peak of ~65k users after the Rexodus, which was already quite small to begin with.
Would you mind elaborating on PieFed vote quotas? I haven’t heard about that.
Good question. There is a lot of active disinformation circulating about PieFed - like it supposedly “hard-coded” certain filters into it, which btw it does the precise opposite of that, not only not hard-coding those but actually making them opt-in, the absolute most friendly and non-mandatory that a code option could be. The main author Rimu argues back against such in his blog post at https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/14/open-source-runs-on-good-faith/.
All that said, the daily vote quota criticism unfortunately is for real. Unlike all the false criticism before that, this one is opt-out rather than opt-in, forcing admins to be aware that it even exists and then figure out a calculation to determine a value that would effectively disable it (which tbf is not hard at all, if someone is aware of its existence). Instance admins were apparently given no notice, expressing surprise at the behavior of their instances after an update that barely mentioned it and rhen buried it deeply in a long list as if it were nothing. Also this anti-feature was rammed through despite somewhat strong criticism, for reasons that seem to make sense to the author and at least one other person but make little sense to the rest of us (i.e. no attempt at reaching consensus or striving for buy-in among stakeholders, at least least not a successful one, and at least as far as I have been able to ascertain).
Briefly, PieFed has decided that by default, unless an instance admin goes out of their way to request otherwise, voting now is limited. Which is arguably fine if it were internal, except this applies to votes received by accounts across the entire wide Fediverse - from Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, little to no indication of that fact is provided - votes simply are discarded, leaving people to wonder why, and Rimu’s response was to get creative in finding alternatives to voting. Votes are (according to him) not meant to make people feel good, but strictly to influence the visibility of an item of content (which ofc makes a LOT of sense, at least in pure theoretical terms) hence it was decided - AGAINST a large outcry from the community - that it was “unfair” that people who use the platform a lot can cause more influence than others.
Many counterexamples were put forth - e.g. a doctor or nurse working days as 12+ hr rather than 8 hr shifts, then wanting to relax and consume Threadiverse content on their rest day, but being blocked from doing so by the quota being strictly a daily one. PieFed thus now imposes restrictions on the style that people use the platform by. Numerous alternatives could have been done - e.g. banning people who purely vote thousands of times yet never write comments, or conversely allow people who do write posts and comments and not merely moderate but put in enormous efforts to actively grow up communities to have a higher limit than those who do not. But instead… everyone has the same (daily) restriction on votes allowed to be received by a community on an instance that implements this restriction.
And again, as evidenced partly by the fact that you are not familiar with this aspect of PieFed: the discoverability of this anti-feature is exceedingly poor. PieFed is currently shadow-censoring votes coming in from other platforms (e.g. Lemmy) without telling them why.
Here is PugJesus’ goodbye message citing his reason to leave the Threadiverse as the implementation of this vote quota along with prior hints that the PieFed software is becoming quite opinionated, in a manner that is accepting of serious discussions but high critical of meme and shitposting styles, i.e. the more “social media” style. So it’s not that PieFed is “bad” here, but it is opinionated and pushing its own agenda, more and more lately, which can still be mitigated by instance admins but with features being opt-out rather than opt-in, PieFed is becoming increasingly less friendly towards the traditional “social media” style of conversation, and is imposing its own vision of what might be better. And again, without really disclosing that fact much where people can see an acknowledgement that it is currently happening.
Here is a post directly from Rimu about the bias underlying the change to implement the vote quota. And here is the OG release announcement, showing this feature buried in the list. Here is a community push-back that lead to what I consider a fascinating technical exploration of the topic, and another one.
If this has been released as merely another opt-in feature, and affected merely votes internally to a PieFed instance, then everything would be different. But instead, people are still sore at Huffman trying to tell us that we are landed gentry, and this change smacks of a similar situation whereby despite the lack of corporate enshittification, nonetheless the people in charge are telling others what they can and cannot do, for opaque reasons that don’t resonate with seemingly much of anyone.
History memes just hasn’t been the same since the piefed nonsense 🙁
I’ve noticed a drop off in several communities on PieFed.social since, and people saying that they wanted to migrate their community or account but now have not.
Tbf if that’s what the instance admin wants it be - mainly for serious content rather than an open and welcoming space - that’s absolutely fine, it’s just a transparency issue where there seems a mismatch between what is said vs. the actual direction it is headed towards.
And I would have hoped that such an unpopular anti-feature would have been made as opt-in rather than opt-out.
Thanks for the explanation. That’s informative and unfortunate.
I am particularly disappointed bc I put literally all of my hopes for the entire future of the Threadiverse itself into PieFed. Lemmy is developed by tankies, and as much as we here don’t care (software, particularly FOSS, is software), people on Reddit care greatly and eschew coming here as a result.
But now they won’t come here to merely a different, inferior version of Reddit, where one person in charge is replaced by another person.
This is all waaaay too simplistic ofc, as PieFed is still amazing software, and Rimu is truly nothing at all like Huffman. But… how much do facts actually matter, to most people?
This is going to harm our ability to draw people from Reddit to here. They are currently pissed about the shadow-banning there, and I don’t think that they will take kindly to the shadow-censoring here, even if it is limited to voting (but not posting or commenting). This place truly is better than here… but this decision opens up PieFed to that MAJOR criticism of the instance admins being landed gentry.
Fortunately - regardless of whether PieFed, Lemmy, or something else like Mbin is used - instance admins still are the arbitrators of what experience their users will encounter. And PieFed offers enormous benefits to spinning up a personal instance, plus under leadership that remains friendly to the social media style, PieFed still has enormous benefits to offer. Plus, obviously, some people even want the serious-content-only style, and will even welcome those changes (I would still argue that the transparency needs to be improved there… but otherwise the changes themselves are not so much “bad” as more surprising, being different than what people are used to, and therefore if not disclosed properly even dismaying?).
So yes, unfortunate, but we move forward regardless. Rimu still works hard at modifying the code as he sees fit, and like the Lemmy devs, offers it as FOSS - and I could ask for little more than that!:-)
https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns
PieFed instance admins can set a limit to how many votes each account can cast each day. I set the default value for this at a level that 99% of us will never reach.
This pissed off some of the 1% (or people who thought they were the 1% but weren’t) so they spent weeks spreading FUD about it.
No idea what that’s about, not using PieFed. They limit what? Why do they do that?I read your explanation.E: BTW I’m not unaware of the ability of for-profits to siphon people away from existing corporate platforms into new corporate or corporate-adjacent platforms, for example. E.g. Twitter -> Bluesky. I think that would be insufficient in the long run to halt the fediverse growth because every time this cycle occurs, some people fall off into the fediverse and that’s usually the more aware people. They tend to create more content.
Most people either seem to be happy with the way things are and don’t even want to grow at all - certainly not “at all costs” - or else they naively think that we will grow merely bc Reddit sucks, with zero effort required beyond that. I am glad that you are aiming at a blend of optimistic realism.
Though in that case, #2 is where the heart of the issue lies: so very MANY people overcame all the hurdles, figured out how to use this place, created an account, even posted here for multiple years, only to leave and now bad-mouth us over on Reddit. Overwhelmingly the sentiment there whenever a community decides to migrate and people ask where should they go, and Lemmy is suggested, the response is “oh HELL NO!!!”
And ofc many more people don’t even make it as far as that - but people are willing to put in a lot of effort, when they see that there is VALUE in doing so. Hence, our reputation being so poor, deprives us in many more ways than just the one, if the goal was to grow.
And I honestly don’t think that we will actually. Maybe in 10 years yes, but not in 1-2. And I, like so many others, have made my peace with that. Especially bc we aren’t really willing to lift a finger to do anything about the main problem that plagues us here - again, our reputation on Reddit. So, we shall remain small (the direct and immediate consequence of that), since collectively that’s what we have decided to do, whether consciously or no.