I am particularly disappointed bc I put literally all of my hopes for the entire future of the Threadiverse itself into PieFed. Lemmy is developed by tankies, and as much as we here don't care (software, particularly FOSS, is software), people on Reddit care greatly and eschew coming here as a result.

But now they won't come here to merely a different, inferior version of Reddit, where one person in charge is replaced by another person.

This is all waaaay too simplistic ofc, as PieFed is still amazing software, and Rimu is truly nothing at all like Huffman. But... how much do facts actually matter, to most people?

This is going to harm our ability to draw people from Reddit to here. They are currently pissed about the shadow-banning there, and I don't think that they will take kindly to the shadow-censoring here, even if it is limited to voting (but not posting or commenting). This place truly is better than here... but this decision opens up PieFed to that MAJOR criticism of the instance admins being landed gentry.

Fortunately - regardless of whether PieFed, Lemmy, or something else like Mbin is used - instance admins still are the arbitrators of what experience their users will encounter. And PieFed offers enormous benefits to spinning up a personal instance, plus under leadership that remains friendly to the social media style, PieFed still has enormous benefits to offer. Plus, obviously, some people even want the serious-content-only style, and will even welcome those changes (I would still argue that the transparency needs to be improved there... but otherwise the changes themselves are not so much "bad" as more surprising, being different than what people are used to, and therefore if not disclosed properly even dismaying?).

So yes, unfortunate, but we move forward regardless. Rimu still works hard at modifying the code as he sees fit, and like the Lemmy devs, offers it as FOSS - and I could ask for little more than that!:-)