Quick tangential question if I may: does PieFed allow the display of downvotes alongside upvotes? I don't mean in the horribly janky tooltip manner I mean like Lemmy does in offering to display an actual number next to but separate from the upvote count? PieFed.social decidedly does not - I've tried every single theme and clicked every setting to no avail there - but is that something that an instance admin can choose to do, without needing to alter the actual code itself to implement that preference? Personally I think that something with 10 upvotes and 9 downvotes is very clearly distinct from something that nobody has even looked at much less interacted with in any capacity, but right now it is exceedingly difficult to tell the two scenarios apart from one another (and sometimes outright impossible for some reason? zooming in as far as humanly possible and tapping quickly 10+ times in succession helps trigger the tooltip ~80% of the time, but not always, while other times it stubbornly refuses to show no matter what).

Begin detailed rant.

The more I learn about things, the more I see that PieFed is "soft-opinionated" in terms of its installation, going far out of its way to allow people to not only opt-out but even have to specifically opt-in to the more controversial aspects it has. Not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out, but still a far cry from being hard-coded as people so often claimed for PieFed features.

And Lemmy is the same way. Virtually the same software that runs Lemmy.ml also runs Lemmy.World. There is a (rather controversial) hidden slur word filter, but iirc that one is opt-in also.

Both software packages break things - Lemmy more often by leaving things broken for half a decade at a time, e.g. why is there no notification sent when someone's content is removed? People even have to find out they they have been banned from an entire instance the hard way!! While PieFed more often by moving forward quickly and disrupting other things in its path, e.g. its form of blocking users from a particular instance does not inform the recipient that their content is being ignored (tbf this is also how Lemmy defederations work as well, so not entirely uniquely a PieFed issue).

And then there is the vote quota: there is still no exposure of that setting to non-admins, right? Like how can a visitor attempting to evaluate an instance even know whether that quota is active or not on a particular instance, or how the setting for the quota on that instance may differ from other instances?

So someone contributing votes to a community housed on a PieFed instance - even if that someone is on an instance running Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc. - will have their votes discarded (this I believe is not in question, as people have reported such), but with zero notification of this event, nor is there a quick way for such a user to see in advance whether it is likely to happen? Afaict, the vote quotas are shadow-censoring Lemmy users, without so much as offering a way to tell how much of their daily quota has been used up, or again short of directly asking an admin themselves, how much of a quota an instance is even applying, or like what time of day the quota resets for their instance, or anything like that.

This shadow censorship is what moves PieFed from being merely "soft-opinionated" into enforcing its viewpoints onto the users of other instances. Tbf, Lemmy does similar here too - shadow-censoring whole entire communities that their users are forbidden from being made aware of existence, without exposing these choices, very unlike the defederation lists that are fully public, or the instance-wide user bans that (usually) are shown in the modlog. So now as I see it, both software packages are "hard-opinionated", just in different ways, but both pushing their viewpoints onto people without offering informed consent.

At least they are FOSS, fwiw.

End detailed rant.

Anyway , as a result of all this I now believe that it is the choice of admin that matters far more to an end-user's experience than which software platform someone is running. PieFed offers superior features, and is especially attractive to admins being easier to run (all the more so using the docker container approach), whereas Lemmy offers a far superiorly polished and flexible UI (e.g. my earlier downvote question). Both have MAJOR - even systemic -flaws, but again... it's FOSS, and what software these days does not?