Talking about baking ideology into the code, the Lemmy devs previously HARD-CODED an English slur word filter. Nutomic said in response:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

This sounds fairly opinionated to me. Fortunately after a HUGE outcry, they did later relent.

Rimu did not have to go to all the trouble of making the vote quota into an environmental variable, easily changed without needing to modify the code (even when running PieFed from a docker container), but he did. Note I am not even defending him here, simply stating facts.

My opinion - shared by most programmers I presume - is that the ideal in both situations would have been to use an opt-in feature, rather than make it opt-out or far worse, HARD-CODE it directly in. Also, it would be nice to announce such things rather than leave people to stumble upon them.

Fwiw, people have previously reported that PieFed hard-codes other matters as well, but this was shown to be misinformation caused by merely looking at lines of code in isolation without bothering to figure out how the code actually works - in particular how those lines are never actually run without particular settings having been turned on.

IF (setting) THEN (feature)

Is NOT the same as hard-coding a feature!!

Also, Lemmy refuses to so much as notify people when their content is removed - overall its set of features is heaviest on giving power to admins, less so to mods, and least of all to the end-users. In contrast, PieFed offers tons of power to users, for instance at least bothering to tell them when their content gets removed by a mod (but ironically not when the voting quota is exceeded, reputedly).

BOTH softwares are fairly opinionated. Lemmy has historically been far more so. Lately it has calmed down and it is PieFed making the waves instead - some of it unfairly, and some of it well-deserved.