I was never a fan of the Lemmy developers, who engage in a… concerning amount of genocide and atrocity denial. In fact, I didn’t want to swap to Lemmy.world to begin with - I originally picked Kbin despite Lemmy fitting my aesthetic preferences better. But when Kbin went down permanently, I wanted to move all my comms quickly so they didn’t die, and Mbin’s main instance at the time was… not federating well.

So when Piefed started to become stable, I saw an opportunity to move away from the Lemmy software, whose devs were constantly asking for money even on non-ML instances (as is normal and is necessary for software development - but again, that’s exactly why I wasn’t comfortable with Lemmy. You’re either a free-rider or helping support the ideals of the ideologically repugnant). Rimu seemed reasonable in my brief chats with him at the time - and I still don’t think he’s unreasonable, per se, just with very… core disagreements about what direction Piefed should be going (ie the notion that ‘power users’ are undesirable and should be limited) and what that will lead to, especially the aforementioned enshittification of my own, personal experience.

It’s a minor annoyance, to try to upvote things and see nothing happen because you hit some arbitrary cap. But interacting with commenters was one of the joys of my time here, even just in small things like upvoting them, since giving inane comment replies like “Thank you!” or “I agree!” evokes anxiety from me rather than giving joy.

That I hit the cap before it was even announced made me suspect that it would be a frequent frustration going forward, and one I simply had no intention of dealing with.

I don’t understand. A vote limit? As in a user can’t vote more than X amount of times per day or something? If so, how does that impact the ability to interact with their audience?

Basically, it made my experience as a user shitty, in part because I was a frequent poster and thus frequently had a number of comments on my posts which were generally positive contributions and I wanted to upvote.

I hate the concept on its own, don’t get me wrong, but it was that I managed to hit it so quickly (before it was even announced) which soured me on staying. If my experience is going to be enshittified, I would rather just… not.

Contributing factors were concerns about how this would affect other ‘power users’ with their experiences likewise enshittified, and thus growth and sustainability; and the broader ‘anti-social-media’ posture it reflected.

It’s social media on the internet, and on the Fediverse at that. I have no expectation of privacy for anything I post here, nor much desire for it, lmao.

Ah, genocide supporter is when you think Israel is a pariah state that should be treated as such.

May many respitorially challenged small dogs bless you, my child! ✋

I actually always felt very appreciated on here by most people! Sadly, it’s purely an issue of energy. Rebuilding the audience on comms on another instance just is too much to do a fourth time. I do still wish the Fediverse the best!

On content: they were saying that bringing up Lysenkoism and saying communist societies didn’t actively WANT to have famines was the equivalent of Holocaust Denial (which I don’t think it is, the Nazis were pretty intentional in doing the Jewish Holocaust).

That’s a cute way of saying “I was downplaying the Holodomor and Great Chinese Famine by spreading misinformation that doesn’t even align with the basic timeline of events and got banned for it”

I don’t really get people who are bothered by Tankies, during a time of rightwing fascism. Tankies are such a small minority that they’re pretty much irrelevant and can be easily avoided or ignored as inconsequential.

In the US, sure.

On the Fediverse, where red fash are a significant proportion and regularly spread misinformation about, say, historical genocides, or fucking North Korea?

On the Fediverse, they’re a problem. Hence why it was important for me to speak up on the problem on the Fediverse, and not, say, when I was on Reddit.

They’d post a lot of pretty lazy rightwing history memes,

Lazy, sure. Right-wing?

and are a pretty ardant anticommunist (buts par for the course in the anglosphere)

Sorry for being more aligned with Marx than Stalin?

But the more i interacted with them, the more i saw long waffly comments without a firm point.

I’ve been accused of many things over the years, but this is probably the first time I’ve been accused of waffling.

Or saw them arguing in favour of common misconceptions, or in favour of outdated “heirarchies are a good thing” understandings of history, or in favour of arguments that more recent research casts a lot of doubt on.

lmao what

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Piefeds, but in ourselves.

I still check in from time to time, check reports, make sure there’s no spam. It’s just that… I don’t have the energy to move the comms again, and I don’t want to put in the effort when the task on the Fediverse seems Sisyphean.

Nah, no worries, it’s fine as-is. I only came here because I was summoned, and I don’t feel good about posting my own material as “best of” anyway.

I meant if you wanted to edit the BestOfLemmy post. XD

Sorry mate, we’re bloody-well drowned in toxic fumes these days. Ontario fires.

Damn. Looking at that now.

I did edit to add in my favorite example, if you want to update. I do love the story of dysentery. :p

Is this okay?

Absolutely!

Many late-coming technologies are issues of concept. Slow-sand filters are incredibly simple, for example, but require an understanding that did not arise until the 19th century (some possible examples in Mesoamerica excepted). Gliders are not actually particularly difficult to acquire the materials or tools to make, especially in cultures that use kites, but require, again, an understanding of the principles involved to provide controlled flight (with gliders requiring precise balance of lift and drag, whereas kites primarily need only light weight and wind stability). Fire pistons are conceptually advanced and were not discovered in Europe until long after they were in Southeast Asia, despite some Southeast Asian cultures which produced and used fire pistons being literal stone-age cultures, in terms of available material tools.

Hot-air balloons, I would imagine, follow the same principle. If you lack the concepts behind the invention, the only way to discover it is by accident, which is generally unlikely. It’s why so much material development is concentrated in the modern and early modern period - we started to piece together how the world, on a fundamental level, works, beyond pure trial-and-error.

Also, hot-air balloons before plastics were often made of silk (and rubber), since most other materials are either too heavy (at least for practical purposes) or too thermally sensitive, and that’s an expensive experiment to be undertaking if you haven’t the first clue how it works.

EDIT: dammit, I forgot about the renewable combustible element in efficient form, necessary.

I mean, early 18th century AD hot-air balloons just used material burned on the ground.

EDIT: I forgot my favorite example! Oral Rehydration Therapy. Understanding how the body is dehydrated and rehydrated allowed doctors in the 19th century, through IV solutions, to drop dysentery (a legitimate killer) mortality rates from ~50% to ~30%. Very advanced, needles and such, understandable why it wasn’t stumbled upon sooner.

… come the 1950s or so, understanding how the body absorbs water led to Oral Rehydration Solution, dropping mortality from ~30% to ~2%.

It can be made with fruit juice, water, and salt. And no additional tools or advanced preparation or specialist administration needed. It’s mixed, and the patient just drinks it - oral rehydration.

Theory isn’t always flashy, but it is often stunning in its successes.

Clay tiles, overwhelmingly. Most stone isn’t worth the effort to make into roof tiles; between the weight, expense, and the high rate of replacement (and preference for easy uniformity) needed in roof tiles, only slate is really consistently used for roofing. Other stone, like marble, was occasionally used as a ‘prestige’ project, but clay tiles can be easily and consistently precisely shaped and fitted, allowing for practical concerns like weight distribution and water runoff to be addressed, so it’s generally just not worth it. And marble doesn’t look all that much better in tile form, tbqh.

Well, I’m too weak and sick to try to zoom in with my traditional power-glove diplomacy, so what do you figure you’ll do then, mate?

As I said in the post.

I’m leaving. I’m out. This is it for me.

I just don’t have the energy to undertake another instance migration with all my comms.

I’ll go back to doomscrolling Tumblr and playing more games, I suppose.

(altho that’s still a lot voting, mate!!)

Sure, but it’s maybe two hours of browsing. I don’t browse for two hours every day, but when I do, I would like to not be frustrated by the experience.

Not a ‘fraud’, in any way. Just a bad decision, and possibly poorly thought out in addition.

I know nothing about the technical side, though the fact that Rimu pivoted to a different explanation when pressed has me skeptical. But it very well could be that voting uses up some significant amount of ‘the commons’ in federating votes. I suspect the actual impact is minimal, though, considering that Piefed.social is the only instance that has even broached the issue, so far as I know, in the three years I’ve been on the Fediverse. And, as mentioned before, it’s trivial to ‘get around’, resulting in the same vote-federation burden as large numbers of votes with one account.

The other explanation offered by Rimu, which I regard as much more likely, is Rimu’s claim that it’s in some way unfair for a small number of users to make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse’s activity. I take him at his word on this - I think he genuinely believes that. No fraud involved. Just a view that power users are some form of ‘influencer’ whose activity is undesirable because it ‘sways’ the community towards the opinions of the most active users.

Rimu, I suspect, thinks that cutting down the tall poppies will just create a more even distribution. Instead, I suspect, it will either result in the former distribution proportion reasserting itself, just with a lower cap and a lower average (thus requiring another reduction of the cap, to ensure a small number of users don’t ‘dominate’ the activity - repeat ad infinitum, or until the instance is dead); or the ‘more even’ distribution being significantly lower in general from decreased activity, as the core function of social media - interaction with others - generates more activity from others as a knock-on effect. It’s self-feeding.

Or self-starving, in this case.

Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?

There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I’m almost at the cap.

~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.

Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day’s output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn’t take much browsing to hit 240 votes.