Of the two, I regard vote restriction as the more inconvenient and troublesome, certainly. But in terms of philosophy-to-code, it seems the same principle - giving admins tools in-line with the devs' values, rather than hard-coding those values into the software.

The more core issue is that Rimu, as an admin, has used that tool in a shitty way (restricting votes specifically to cut down the 'top voters', rather than any of the marginal utility uses).

This is all so terribly complex.

For instance, yes vote manipulation is arguably worse than slur filtering - both are censorship though, while then again both are changes to the contract of allowable content, rather than silent effects put upon existing submissions.

The Lemmy situation having been implemented in a HARD-CODED manner is generally considered to be overall much worse, forcing instance admins who wanted to change the situation to literally have to edit the sourcecode, whereas on PieFed all someone has to do is define an environmental variable (outside of the docker container iirc). Lemmy's therefore was mandatory, rather than PieFed at least offering the ability to opt-out. Separately from the content of the respective issues (slurs and quotas), those process matters mean a great deal.

Lemmy also does implement its political ideology into its codebase - perhaps more in line with the features that it does NOT implement more than those that it DOES. e.g. if you recall, while Reddit lacks a modlog, it does offer a modmail, a notification bothering to tell someone that their content has been moderated, and the ability to continue conversation in a deleted post, neither of which Lemmy offers, while PieFed now allows deleted posts to remain up sometimes, and offers notifications for all moderation events. Lemmy is fairly authoritarian then, offering a great deal of power to an instance admin, a bit lesser to a moderator, and least of all to a mere user. A user has very little "rights" or "power" to affect change of their experiences on Lemmy, but PieFed is the polar opposite in that regard.

For example, PieFed offers a much more democratic style of moderation that doesn't even need someone to decide for you what content is presented to you, by its provision of tools that allow you to decide for yourself. e.g. people bitterly complain about political topics in places like c/lemmyshitpost, which if the users were on PieFed they would not need a daddy mod, and instead could just add a keyword filter to reduce or get closer to eliminating mentions of words like "Musk" or "Trump", etc. Notice how this is not censorship, bc it is left up to the individual recipient to decide for THEMSELVES what they want to do. Like if someone wants a break for a minute from such (or month), they can decide to do so, and then turn off the filter to resume as normal. Nobody else makes that call: just you, as the user.

This vote quota is fundamentally different though: here the votes are actually censored, not by the choice of end-user but by the instance admin. Which by itself I should add would be fine, except it was not announced almost at all, and the entire roll-out is the complete opposite of transparency. Which PieFed instances will use a vote quota & which will not? Among the former, what values are used? What if that changes later - who will notify the users that their vote contributions are no longer welcome, and on what timescale? The admins seem unprepared for all of this - I wonder if they were even told in advance that it was coming (it was discussed but were they told when a decision had been made?). I've seen at least two reports (possibly of the same situation) where admins were caught unawares and when they updated to v1.7 used the vote quota anti-feature without being aware of this fact.

Lemmy software is not ideal, but is manageable with effort. Now PieFed falls into that category as well, but with more features overall to start with. Use whichever you prefer - one is not more ideologically pure than the other.

I need to say though that for some people it is not as simple as using one or the other: some people actually donate to these projects, and some people have a VERY hard time donating to an instance that believes in an ideology that would see everyone in every Western civilization killed, for the crime of not being purely communist enough (although somehow Russia, China, and North Korea are "communist", despite all the objective evidence to the contrary?). Also, the Lemmy devs have outright refused to separate donations to the further development of the Lemmy codebase vs. the operating costs of Lemmy.ml. That is not me that is tying those two concepts together: that is a firm decision by the actual developers, which they offer no negotiation on. Part of PieFed's appeal was as an alternative to that, which is why it is so disheartening to now see that it is less "unequivocally better" and more "simply different" in terms of how it interjects its own political ideology into the codebase... although even there, as I noted above, the two are still not "equal" - i.e. Rimu did not have to expend the additional effort to make this an opt-out feature, but he did, thus limiting the amount of effort required to change the code's behavior in this regard.

Though the ideal would have been to have expended roughly the same amount of effort and make it an opt-in rather than opt-out feature. Both Lemmy and PieFed sometimes inject their respective political ideologies into the code, but not equally so.