Vote quota?
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Yes it was just recently added from the Piefed 1.7 Update.
To reduce server load and network traffic, a maximum number of votes that can be cast each day has been set at a level that will only affect the top 2% of voters, leaving the bottom 98% unaffected. This quota can be altered with an environment variable. View a profile to see how much of their daily quota has been used.
Approximately how many upvotes are the limit? I tend to upvote a lot of content that I like as well as comments.
Do you need to be logged in to view it, because I can't see it: https://piefed.social/u/flamingos@feddit.uk.
Edit: Yes, you do: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/918731bb80ee739d4b9963ce64acbbfd3f6afb41/app/user/routes.py#L121
It turns out that 10 people are casting more votes than the bottom 50% of us are. Effectively, 10 people are determining what is popular and what is not, on this platform.
The vote quota is an attempt to address that.
You said in the release notes that this was about server load, but now it's about people voting too much for your tastes? 14K unique people cast at least one vote in the past day, I really doubt 10 people are having a great impact on the rankings. And if you think people are bots manipulating the rankings, then wouldn't it be better to bring it up in the admin chats so they get banned?
Also, what's the methodology you've used there? You say the top voter has 23K votes, but from feddit.uk's data the top voter is at 19K, who happens to be a p.s user mind you.
It is also about server load, yeah.
The server infrastructure that we provide is a commons - a finite shared resource that people use. Why would we let 0.02% of the people take half of it? Couldn't we just rein in that 0.02% and then spend way less money on servers?
You seem to keep flipping on this point, which is confusing to me.
If a limit must be applied for that reason, then so be it.
How much server costs would be saved though by this limiting, or is that simply a theoretical consideration?
Wouldn't more savings be possible by something else like limiting uploaded image sizes, or like only allow 10 images per month (uploading a new one automatically deletes the prior one)? And if so, what is the benefit of that other solution vs. the effects of throttling the top contributors? Both decrease the overall health of the network, so which at least maximizes the savings from having done so?
My 241st vote when it realises it's going to a piefed instance:
Omg this will really break the whole federated model won't it? It's already insane that different instances hold different vote counts from one another, but this adds a whole new twist on top.
Genuine question: does this mean that PieFed is now no longer ActivityPub compliant? Is it not fully part of the Threadiverse anymore, and is now its own little subset of that? Even Mbin still accepted vote counts, even though it added boosts ("increases" and "reductions" iirc?) on top of them.
Could you tell from your look at the code if PieFed is only throttling its own users internally, prior to votes federating out, or throttling incoming votes from Lemmy as well?
Also this is so ridiculously easy to get around: most of us have a variety of obvious and self-acknowledged alts across the Threadiverse, but I doubt PieFed is going to maintain a mapping among all of them and apply the throttle universally across the entire set. e.g. Blaze goes back to his empire of alts, one for each day of the week, and continues upvoting without restriction.
The KISS principle would seem to apply - why needlessly complicate matters?
Edit: I found your missing vote btw, here it is:
Edit 2: I thought the above image was from Black Hole Sun, but now I am not so sure of that... anyway it seems to fit, regardless:-P.
Genuine question: does this mean that PieFed is now no longer ActivityPub compliant? Is it not fully part of the Threadiverse anymore, and is now its own little subset of that? Even Mbin still accepted vote counts, even though it added boosts (“increases” and “reductions” iirc?) on top of them.
Let's not catastrophise. Piefed is still ActivityPub compliant, or as compliant as it was. Nothing in the spec says you have to accept an activity, it'd be pretty nonsensical if it did because moderation wouldn't be possible.
Could you tell from your look at the code if PieFed is only throttling its own users internally, prior to votes federating out, or throttling incoming votes from Lemmy as well?
It's throttling incoming votes as well, you can see that here. It honestly wouldn't make much sense if it didn't, though it is irksome that it blocks announcing the vote to other instances. That makes piefed comms something the really active users will avoid.
Also this is so ridiculously easy to get around: most of us have a variety of obvious and self-acknowledged alts across the Threadiverse, but I doubt PieFed is going to maintain a mapping among all of them
Even if they tried to do that, people would just stop being forthcoming with their alts.
Thank you for your measured response.
Throttling PieFed users is bad enough, but throttling users of other platforms seems akin to censorship. Like if you want to access the full Threadiverse then you can do so from Lemmy + mBin + nodeBB etc., but if you access via PieFed then you don't get the full range of activities. In some ways PieFed is Threadiverse++ (the API supports user & post flairs, polls, emoji reactions, etc., on top of internal organization goodies like categories of communities if you use the web UI), but in some ways it is also Threadiverse—, intentionally choosing to ignore some contributions from the wider Fediverse.
At a minimum that would be quite... odd to explain to people.
And thank you also for the additional code peek!:-)
wat