You cannot cast a vote on PieFed if you’ve made 0 replies, 0 posts, AND your username is 8 characters long

Okay. So? This is in part anti-spam measures. It's very specific, but how many users do you imagine this applies to in practice?

When a reply is created, from anywhere, that only contains the word “this”, the comment is dropped

Piefed.social only. Toggleable off.

Every user (remote or local) has an “attitude” which is calculated as follows: (upvotes cast - downvotes cast) / (upvotes + downvotes). If your “attitude” is < 0.0 you can’t downvote. Again there is no mention of this anywhere but deep within his biased-code

Yes, this is to mitigate mass-downvoting. Why is this inherently a problem to you?

Every account has a Social Credit Score. If your account has less than 100 Social Credit Score and is newly created, you are not considered “trustworthy” and there are limitations placed on what your account can do. Your Social Credit Score is calculated as upvotes earned - downvotes earned aka Reddit Karma. If your reputation is at -10 you also cannot downvote, and you can’t create new DMs. It also flags your account automatically if your reputation is to low. Echo-chamber achieved!

Trolls/spammers etc are serious problems on sites like Lemmy and Piefed. If you’re a new account and you’ve managed to get -100 reputation that quickly, it’s not a good sign. If and as the Fediverse grows, instance owners are going to need more observation tools to catch this type of stuff.

If you use em dashes your account is flagged to the admin, more like 1984-fed

AI detection tools. But I’ve seen a lot of AI posters right now caught through this. use of the em-dash is very much a sign, unfortunately. It doesn’t ban them by the way. It just flags new accounts doing it to admins. So? Admins can turn this off.

if you try to comment a .gif … you fail because the code lord Rimu doesn’t like it

Can be turned off at the instance level.

Rimu has turned the block into an instance wide shadowban again without telling anyone

No. If every instance was Piefed, you simply wouldn’t be able to reply to anyone who has blocked you. “Reply” is essentially faded out. The difference is that Lemmy doesn’t implement the block function in the same way, so Piefed just throws out replies by blocked users to the person who has blocked them coming from Lemmy. That’s the mismatch at play here.

If you can somehow still reply via a Piefed instance, it is bugged and not working as intended.

He vindictively targeted a single user with code

This has been removed now, and it wasn't "vindictive" in purpose at all.