As someone whose email inbox numbers in the thousands, I'm not sure how I feel about this one.

Obviously this is very limiting Intentionally, for now.

is Piefed unable to do so

PieFed is able to do so, and has been doing so.

But I don't think think it should have to and I don't think we should let a handful of people have the amount of influence they have been having. Did you see the graphs I shared in the matrix room?

You have to use the link Rimu shared to search for their instance, and the scroll through the people on the instance. This is inconvenient. It's supposed to be, for now. If you look for someone on a small instance with not many users, it will be easier.

That being said, I'm not seeing this particular guy's account from here either. I can only even see a handful of the 586 users on that particular instance. It may be a federation issue there.

It is called the Intolerance Paradox. There is no scenario in which feeding the trolls will ever work out well in the end. Appeasement never works.

All that said, I would have no problem with a quota specifically for downvotes, if the rationale is that people sometimes misuse them but that such a quota would help steer them towards a better understanding of alternative actions they could take to enjoy their time on the Fediverse without such tension.

That said, I recognize that this is an incomplete, even arguably naive perspective since I am unaware of the technical hurdles being faced. Which raises difficult questions: if Lemmy is able to handle not only the current scale of tens of thousands of users but another order of magnitude or so beyond that, then is Piefed unable to do so? (Again, I do not know the answer here nor would be much help in finding one, just stating the questions that will arise from this, especially from the ML crowd looking for any excuse to criticize what they stubbornly see as solely a competitor rather than ally against corporate interests.)

If you say "yes" though... then that is what a bot would say, no? 🤪

Mastodon is 20x bigger than Lemmy, in terms of the amount of people using it. So once they start sending us their toots in earnest, we could be looking at a 2x increase in federation load, easily. Could be 10x within a few weeks.

So I'm not keen to unleash that flood all at once. I'll adjust PieFed to cope with it as it builds up slowly.

What am I missing?

Once again, thanks the devs for the hard work.

• Send a DM to a user asking them if they are a bot, with 1 click. If they do not respond their account is automatically flagged as a bot

This is dumb, I don’t respond to my DM’s at all, especially if someone is asking me if I am a bot out of no where.

On everyone's profile is a bar showing how much of their quota has been used. I'll be monitoring this to see what happens. If it's cramping everyone's style too much then it'll be removed.

I'm pretty sure that on shared instances with more than a few dozen users All would become swamped with trash from Mastodon and basically unusable. But maybe the Hot sort would cope, if Mastodon posts had few likes...

This is one of those things that can only be found out once it's in production and the feature is being used a bit. So far https://piefed.social/c/microblogs?sort=new is pretty tame but it could become a flood, easily.

Sometimes development is like feeling your way through a dark room.

for e.g. disinformation removal would seem preferable, whereas for misinformation mere downvoting may be sufficient

This is what I half-suspected as the reason for why some feel so attacked by this change. What is disinformation is quite ephemeral in this post modern era and in the end it means that you’re downvoting things you disagree with. And unfortunately that usually means things that don’t match people’s pre-existing beliefs.