The Lemmy dev team likewise has pretty extremist views, and notoriously goes much further to censor and limit what uses can do… but crucially, less of that (not fully zero, but less relatively speaking) makes its way into the software.

If you were running your own instance, I would pick PieFed, hands-down with barely any resistance to that personally. Most of the controversial features are even opt-in (rather than opt-out), and such extremely nice onboarding features both for users new to the Threadiverse and those new to installing instances (e.g. the docker container) making setting one up a breeze, especially in comparison. Or there’s the nice PyLova fork that goes even further beyond merely disabling those controversial features by having outright removed them from the code, plus adding a few new features on top.

But if you are using a public instance, I see now that your choice of admin team has far more to do with your ultimate experience than whether it runs Lemmy or PieFed. Quokka even switched from Lemmy to PieFed and I think it was sh.itjust.works that announced that they would do likewise in later 2026. Either way, your admin team decides whether they want to run things in an authoritarian fascist manner, or democratic, or anarchist fashion, and especially if as an end-user you are accessing your instance via a 3rd-party app like Voyager, you will notice such things far more than what software it is running under the hood.

I feel like the social credit system, like most descriptions of PieFed features by people who have barely glanced at them before complaining about them exceedingly publicly, is quite misunderstood.

For one thing it does not affect 99.6% of users, as Rimu mentioned somewhere in this thread. And for another, you have to be downvoted like 10x more often than upvoted to receive that label - which is also temporary. A single comment (or handful of them) won’t do it - you need to consistently be bucking all of the trends, in a MAJOR way, to receive this label. Think: going into a Linux sux community and trying to say that Linux is superior - I mean, objectively speaking “duh” (says me who uses multiple OSs on a daily basis), but read the room, you know? They specifically made the community to crap on Linux, so let the babies whine in peace rather than incel your way into correcting them inside their safe spaces? When people have the choice of man vs. bear, don’t be the reason that people choose the bear…

But mainly: it’s just a label. It does nothing whatsoever to actually filter the content - there are no options to make use of the label in that fashion. And several times the label has proved helpful to me, like I was going to write a reply to someone but then I noticed the label. A quick glance at their post history confirms that the new account is a far-right leaning recent refugee from Reddit, who will be uninterested in all of my “facts” and “truth”, and I quickly see the futility of even attempting to try. So I don’t bother, and I am grateful to the label for alerting me to the likelihood of having ended up with that same opinion, but only after having learned the hard way.

Though labels are up to the recipient how they want to make use of them? Sometimes I decide to simply ignore them, particularly in certain contexts, while other times I follow through a bit to see if they are justified to my eyes. Irl has “reputations” as well - so why not here, particularly when they are useful and people want them? When applied gently and optionally, they can be useful tools.

The vote quota thing though - that is wholly bad, I agree there. It’s especially heinous since it shadow-censors people’s contributions without disclosure of that fact. The reputation indicator purely works for the behest of an end-user, but the vote quota applies also to users of other PieFed instances (even those that have disabled the vote quota), and also those of Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, there is zero method whereby e.g. a Lemmy user could check in advance to see if their contributions are going to be censored. Basically any community housed on a PieFed instance that uses vote quotas can be throwing out contributions with no modlog entries, zero explanation or notification of it ever happening, and especially no ability to know in advance when it will occur. And users on those PieFed instances that have their votes constrained will also have their votes discarded even when attempted to be offered onto communities housed on Lemmy instances.

A great deal of the criticism about PieFed’s features has been demonstrated to be based upon outright disinformation - e.g. supposedly “hard-coded features” are not only not hard-coded, but turned off by default hence opt-in rather than opt-out, an extreme rarity in software and very friendly actually - but the vote quota criticism is imho totally valid as it is an extremely unfriendly and insensitive thing to do to others (even though somewhat rare, if that matters to anyone). i.e. PieFed is quite opinionated in its features offered. Personally I see Lemmy as doing likewise - though more in features not offered than in ones implemented (e.g. why choose to not notify anyone of a moderation event happening to them? do they have a “right” to know or not, if they are e.g. banned from a community?) - but not to the same degree, with PieFed going much further than Lemmy in terms of injecting the politics of its dev team directly into the codebase (though each feature can individually be disabled by instance admins, or just use the PyLova fork that has tweaked these settings already, plus added a few new features on top).

Like me — I love these things!! 😍 (I never use them properly though—iirc there is supposed to be no space between them and the letters like that, and also they should appear in pairs, but I dare to be different!)

Narrator: and they did.

The first light grey item, near the bottom.

No no no no no - keep up! We’re talking about “Jason” - the one who was killed but came back to continue his task anyway… oh, I see the confusion now 🤔🤪

Don’t ask - if he told you then he’d have to kill you…

oh no, not again.

Skill issue.

git guud

This wholesomeness level, i-i-

Not really - all he does is ask questions ⁉️

But… what YEAR???

Skill issue: do better. (Referring to the parents that gave little her this advice.)

Hers are the same way.

It’s too bad they won’t allow funding to go towards development of just the software itself, separately from the moderation and other costs of maintaining Lemmy.ml. As it is, Lemmy is a tankie platform first and foremost, and only secondarily offered for use by the rest of the world. You can see this in the development philosophy even: like even Reddit offers a modmail, notification upon moderation events, and ability to see deleted posts (PieFed offers some of this too), though Lemmy offers strong rights to instance admins, and somewhat lessened ones for moderators, but significantly weaker privileges to mere users (who I guess they feel don’t deserve to be told upon e.g. being banned from an instance, and instead merely have to find out the hard way?).

Adding to this: a lot of the most heinous, truly “problematic” stuff ended up being demonstrably false accusations - like a feature may be opt-in, or at worst opt-out, but either of those is a far cry from being hard-coded as was claimed.

That said, the software truly is “opinionated”, pushing its own agenda even if you can opt-out of most of it - an instance admin still has to be wary of each new feature added, especially with the lack of transparency surrounding the announcements.

Although personally I think Lemmy is equally opinionated, just more in the sense of what features it decides not to implement at all.

Both platforms have their advantages, and it seems more important for an end-user to pick a good admin team that reflects their values more than picking a platform, especially if using a 3rd-party app than replaces the UI anyway. (Though secondary to that, I do think PieFed has the strongest edge, especially right now before the release of Lemmy 1.0.)

Of course it looks that way to you, since your instance already defederated from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and other toxic cesspits - see recent example (Lemmy.World’s statement and reasoning for defederation from Lemmy.org). The LW admin team does a lot of work to keep things this chill.:-)

To add to what Vicinus said, it’s like when people get divorced - it’s a breakdown of communication between instances, a means of last resort. Here is a recent example when your instance defederated from Lemmy.org:

due to lack of moderation on their side. This instance has open registrations, seemingly zero abuse prevention on signup, including not requiring emails. This leads to a small number of people constantly creating new disposable accounts for various types of abuse with zero consequences. Their admin is the CEO of an ad company, which surely doesn’t affect incentives. They do virtually zero moderation, allowing all these abusive accounts to rampantly harass other instances…

We, as well as other people, including at least one admin of another instance, have attempted to reach out to them about their lack of moderation, but we haven’t received any response at all. At this point there isn’t really anything left besides defederating them, which several other instances have already done as well.

Or here is the historical statement about defederation from Hexbear: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330, though those links are very old and probably not functional anymore.

It’s like when someone repeatedly sends you unsolicited spam, even after you beg and plead with them to stop, and so as a last resort you finally block them. Incels arguing against it claim that their right to speak should triumph over your right to not have to listen but… that is simply not true.

Including OP’s too:-). Except lemmy.ml, obviously.