Instance admins are - and should be - entirely free to pick and choose who gets platformed on their own personal machines. That is their freedom and right! Though you are likewise free to pick an instance that aligns well with your own values, or even spin up one of your own (even using PieFed, or alternately Lemmy or Mbin, etc.) - that is your freedom and right!!:-)

A lot of what gets said about PieFed is overblown or even untrue… but obviously not all. I see that you are banned from the entire instance of PieFed.social… though I also see a significant amount of content from you hosted on that instance - so maybe there’s a bug and the ban didn’t take? (iirc that has happened before…) Or perhaps there’s a different bug and it expired already, but without indication of that fact? The modlog offers no reason why, just that it was done by an admin.

The Political Left is fairly divisive, but it’s that way everywhere, it’s just that there’s more of such people here than most other places. And it is highly ironic that the people who claim to most value empathy are the least likely to offer it to others on a personal level - though in fairness this has more to do with “extremism” and the tribal level of thinking that are traps often fallen into by people on both sides of any kind of political division that someone chooses to make.

I suppose your options are either to mask up, or narrow your spaces of interactions, or else simply become insensitive to others responses (I hope you don’t choose this option). The easiest route might be to avoid discussing anything even remotely political in the largest communities here. Bc while you may have been offered a “right” to speak your mind simply by making an account on some instance somewhere in the Threadiverse, other instances and also each community and individually also reserves the right to not enjoy what you have to say, and to not offer their spaces to platform your views.

I thought it is already that way? Like if an instance does not respond for iirc 3 days in a row then it gets removed. That’s probably just yet one more PieFed thing lacking in Lemmy though.

I did hope so.

Technically I still do, but it’s all so terribly complicated that it scares people away - Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin, and then what experience someone would get from each individual instance, like how are things on PieFed.zip vs. PieFed.social vs. quokk.au.

All of which allow exposure to tankies on Lemmy.ml, thus requiring effort on behalf of the new users to first discover the controversy and decide what to do about it, and then figure out ways to implement their decision (which as with pretty much everything else is far easier on PieFed than Lemmy).

We have a reputation problem, and PieFed does little to solve that. I once placed strong hopes that the “instance chooser” in particular would help, but that hope has not turned into reality.

Well they would have to come from somewhere. Bluesky, Reddit, touching grass irl, Facebook, something.

It was easier for those of us who came here with the early-adopter mindset. The next wave will need… I’m not sure what, but something different than what worked for us earlier on.

Same. I only lurk on certain Reddit threads, rarely, bc we lack niche ones here.

Tbf if you are interested in topics rather than people, then Mastodon is simply inferior to the Threadiverse - as you gave the best description I’ve ever seen on that point.

Friendica is inferior as well, but more on the technical side. It is struggling and instances shutting down due to lack of stability and efficiency, with costs rising far too high along with number of users. They’ve put out calls for programming aid to help fix those issues. As a non-user, I thought their main focus was on people rather than topics of conversation though?

The Threadiverse has quite the reputation for having such solid products - whether written in Rust with custom front-end or in Python with flask front-end (and Postgresql back-end), or Mbin is in PHP, and nodeBB uses Node.js.

Or any instance that federated with them. Unlike lemmy.world, a ton of smaller instances - all of those that I looked at, like StarTrek.website and mander.xyz and discuss.online - did not defederate from hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml, or ofc Lemmy.ml.

After a random comment in hexbear.net - in a post found by browsing All - and then again in Lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Threadiverse myself. Instead, I merely left Lemmy for PieFed for a couple years before wanting to try a bunch of 3rd-party apps.

We’ve all had those kinds of experiences, so it is no wonder why people left and now talk about us behind our back as if we tolerate tankie toxicity - i.e. we are a tankie bar - bc we do, and we are, and they simply find that unacceptable.

bOtH sIdEs SaMe.

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.

People already know - that’s the problem.

See e.g. these comments from a community that a couple of months ago was considering whether to switch from Reddit to the Threadiverse (https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/):

I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.

There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic

There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit

Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier

Sadly, these seem representative of how people think of us here. You can see it for yourself too: simply browse most instances from an account without your existing blocks, in order to see what it is like from the eyes of a Redditor. Worse, they are primarily religious (Christian, Muslim, Mormon, whatever) centrists, and not only do they not FEEL welcomed here, but… in truth… they AREN’T ⁉️

Many also use - <gasp> - fucking Windows!!1! (Or Macs) People here are extremely toxic towards viewpoints seen as totally, completely, 💯% incorrect.

Which makes sense. But then it begs the question: people keep saying that we should try to increase the number of people coming here from Reddit but like… do we really want that? Truly?

Most of Reddit’s users do not post, comment, or even vote.

Tbf the 90-9-1 rule applies everywhere on social media, ostensibly including here though many claim to have merely lurked there yet actually talk here. But we may still have a 51-48-1 distribution here?

When hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml are defederated, then nearly 100% of the time the most batshit insane replies I see are from Lemmy.ml.

Echo chambers do horrible things to people:-(.

Especially from hexbear, which not every instance defederates from.

Though I’ve also seen more than a few people so proud at their choice to flaunt pushing past consent, from Lemmy.ml.

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.

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.

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!:-)

Well said.

I think nodeBB also is included as part of the Threadiverse, although it seems not a full-fledged member, and I am not well-versed enough to know why (perhaps connection via the ActivityPub Protocol is still being rolled out to all the instances?).

Meta’s Threads is indeed entirely irrelevant to any of this, except that they wanted to horn in on our fun, but they killed themselves before they could begin, though not before we had already preemptively blocked it all! 🤣

Oh, and also they stole our name. Or rather tried to, but fuck that noise - we took it right back!!

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.

Here is an interesting post on the topic. The TLDR is that the term Threadiverse predated the shitty attempt by Threads to do whatever, and some of the biggest names in the Threadiverse including the software developers underpinning it decided not to allow Meta to steal it from us.

Besides, Threads is more or less fully dead now, isn’t it? And anyway it’s preemptively defederated by pretty much literally every instance out there, including those that famously defederate from virtually anything (edit: nothing) else - including even CSAM spammers.

Regardless, long live the Threadiverse! Other terms like Forumverse or just Verse may have worked better but… meh, people got used to calling it the Threadiverse and it just kinda stuck, or rather they did not want to change it. Feel free to advocate for something better, but the matter feels kinda settled now, so you would be going against what everyone else does routinely now.

In that post I included links to older comments proving usage of that term prior to Meta announcing its naming of Threads. We truly had it first, so using the term now is not in homage to them, but rather in spite of them.

Also, at this point I usually add an obligatory fuck spez… except I realize that I haven’t done so for months now, because at some point it’s okay to simply move on and forget him. That’s the real way to dispose of trolls: just forget they ever existed in the first place! :-P

This is simply not true.

1. nothing in life is ever fully “guaranteed”

2. our numbers have been actively decreasing since the Rexodus - from 60k at our peak down to ~35k now

3. 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.

And some of them upon arriving here, noped out (either immediately or waiting a few years first) and went back:-(.

That type definitely will not be so eager to return.