Even worse, it's an automated question, so it's a bot asking a human if it's a bot!?

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

I wouldn't mind a per-minute rate limitation of anything - posts, comments, even voted, though a per-day one feels weird. Without that immediate feedback it is something that someone impacted by it would need to expend effort towards tracking, as if those additional votes were arguably somehow "bad" (otherwise why limit them at all? I mean for a normal human, even the top 2% of us, but obviously a superhuman bot level of activity would be something else entirely - and in fact in that case, could rather be handled by banning the account rather than merely limiting its contributions?) rather than contributions made to enliven a social media network that by most accounts (e.g. posts to various Fediverse communities) already lies more on the spectrum towards the fairly dead side, rather than being too active.

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.)

Hrm, personally I just unsubscribe or at worst even block a community or account rather than feel the need to downvote every single thing across the entire Internet. Though I suppose downvotes could play a role in combating it, it seems preferable to me to disengage entirely - e.g. when Hexbears refuse to play by the rules, even when pleaded to by their own admins (yet with zero enforcement enacted on their part), then defederate entirely, or if the instance admin refuses to - which is worth consideration as to whether you want to remain on such an instance - then ban the instance yourself personally.

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.

Rule breaking and bad faith actors / trolling should instead be reported and handled via moderation. Downvotes should simply be the opposite of an upvote.

This approach of using downvotes for everything you want to reduce visibility of results in a situation where groups of users engage in the voting warfare I was talking about. It’s cancer that invites more and more escalation until everyone has to vote on everything just to have their voices not buried. It’s a bad user experience for everyone except most fanatical.

Yeah, ya can't do it that way. That's how you follow Mastodon users from Mastodon.

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.

If you look at Phanpy, they use colors to delineate the origin of posts (boosted, hashtag, follower, etc.). Would be neat to see a similar approach here. I realize this is still early days but maybe something to add to the roadmap.

A per-minute rate limit wouldn't work here because people go through bursts of activity - I might do 50 votes in 3 minutes, then none for 10 hours. If the rate limit was 50 votes per 3 minutes then people would still be able to cast thousands of votes per day.

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're only seeing a handful because those are the ones who posted in a community at some point or replied to a post in a community. The vast majority of Mastodon users have never interacted with any threadiverse content so they won't show up on piefed.social.

Obviously this is very limiting Intentionally, for now.

> @rimu@piefed.social said in PieFed v1.7 is released: Following People, Faster Browsing & Smarter Moderation:
>
> 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

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