All votes, up or down, whether from Lemmy or the local or a different PieFed instance, are now restricted by an admin-set quota value. This was quietly reported outside of Matrix channels, buried into part of the 1.7 release of the code - see the exact relevant line at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335.

This value can be adjusted however the admins desire (e.g. the PieFed.zip admins say they have set it to a ridiculously high value to essentially disable it, and other PieFed instances are coming out strongly against it), but by default is set at 240 (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/config.py#L191, thanks to flamingos@feddit.uk for reporting these lines of code). As in you can vote 240 times per day before you are blocked from doing so further. Logged-in PieFed users can see how much of their local instance quota they've used so far, but (i) no numeric values are presented, only a visual bar where you have to guess at where you are (e.g. do I have 10 votes left now? 100? 2?), (b) this will only show you the LOCAL instance quota - not the quotas of OTHER instances, and in particular the vote quota seems applied to incoming votes from Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. platforms as well as PieFed instances, and (c) none of this is explained anywhere, on any page, e.g. there is currently no way to tell which instances use those quotas, nor what values they are currently set at.

And I thought I recalled hearing that there are caps already on posts and comments too, but I haven't studied the code and I think this is not well known, if it is even true rather than me misremembering or misunderstanding something. PieFed seems to be going to some effort to limit its users ability to interact with the Threadiverse. Which obviously for some admins is going to be a big plus, to keep costs down by silencing all the "noise" from messy human interactions (although I don't fully understand this: if that is what you want then why not just stop pulling in votes altogether, and simply sort by New?) but the manner in which this implementation has been rolled out... leaves PieFed open to an immense amount of criticism.