Huh. Are we really defining “power users” as ones who vote a whole bunch every day? Because I’d never in a million years chance on that angle.

Power users are those who use a system a disproportionately large amount. Rimu explicitly said it was because the distribution of activity between the most active users (ten or so of us, if memory serves) and the majority.

This is not actually unusual in any online community, but it was apparently worth Rimu's ire, even after being advised against it by several people, including a fellow Fediverse admin.

That’s not quite true as I understand it. No, I do believe the changes directly help with the stated goals of keeping down vote-brigading / botting and such. That’s some important shizzle that needs to happen no matter the implementation.

Rimu explicitly said that he didn't think that the top ten users who he was targeting were bots or coordinated. Furthermore, as other people have pointed out, it's trivially easy to set up a bot to circumvent the voting limit. The only people this punishes are people who are actually interested in interacting with the Fediverse on one account - in other words, the people least likely to be bots or bad actors.

For sure I didn’t realise that some here hit their vote limit, but what are the metrics on that?

I don't know about the metrics, but I noted in my goodbye thread numerous users whose 'vote quota' bars were filled up. Most of them weren't Piefed.social users, so they won't even be aware that their votes are being rejected by Piefed.social. Their vote is shadow-banned, in a sense.

Is it maybe better for the cap to be lifted in to a sort of zone that meets both requirements?

What 'other requirement' is there, if the problem was not and has never been botting or bad actors? The only two justifications offered by Rimu have been that it's a 'bad use' of 'the commons' for people to vote so much; and that a small number of users should not make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse's activity.

PJ, is just possible that you keeping up the unholy pace of contributing amazing content here on a daily basis possibly weared on you over time? Personally I know it’s been for me, altho I work in a different format. But three years is a hell of a long time to contribute to a free internet project intended for the public good.

No, not at all. Fact is, I miss it terribly, even only a week out. I miss posting much more than voting and browsing, even. But I'm also not going to be half-in and half-out, generating content but stripped of the ability to interact with the content of others on my own terms - terms that I've been interacting on for the past three years, and that has never been a problem - in any instance - until now. "I upvote what I like" is apparently no longer acceptable on Piefed.social, if you're online 'too much'.