WatDabney

Centralization under 100 people is still centralization.

The key to the fediverse is that there is NO central authority. Not a purportedly limited or constrained or distributed one but none at all, in any way, shape or form.

And we want to keep it that way.

You can't have a full round robin of duplication. In order to have duplicates, you have to have one central original, of which all the rest are duplicates.

And that's exactly the sort of thing the fediverse is intended to avoid.

Every instance is federated but ultimately separate. The accounts on those separate instances are necessarily also separate. There is no possible scheme by which those necessarily separate accounts can be consolidated that does not involve, at some point, some central authority to implement it and/or manage it.

Who would manage this platform?

What would their business model be?

Ah... yes. You're not the OP. You're the one pushing a platform with built in subscription gatekeeping and a raft of reputational anti-features.

Figures.

That undoubtedly had some effect.

But then, look at this thread for a particularly egregious counterexample.

The reputational anti-features are part of what makes me suspicious. I agree entirely with your impression of it.

And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it's gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.

The other thing though is Piefed's automated subscription feature, which, if it gains enough clout, will allow it to effectively promote or undermine, as the devs prefer, communities or even entire instances, and to erect a barrier to entry for new communities and new instances, simply by granting or withholding inclusion on its subscription lists. That's the primary thing that triggers my suspicion.

Well - that and the fact that aside from anti-features like reputation and automated subscriptions, I don't see anything notable about the software, and to the degree that it differs from lemmy or mbin, it seems if anything to be inferior, which makes the sudden flood of praise just that much more suspicious.

i presume you're questioning the assertion that it seems like an attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse?

Yes - anyone is free to start an instance.

However, a new instance is not going to get any communities on Piefed's preset list of subscrptions, nor is any community which the Piefed devs, for whatever reason, disapprove of or oppose or simply dislike. And that means that if Piefed can gain enough users (by, for instance, astroturfing the appearance of greater popularity than it in fact currently enjoys), then it will be able to effectively gatekeep the fediverse - to undermine or advance existing instances and create an insurmountable barrier to entry for new instances, by granting or withholding positions on its list of communities to which users are automatically subscribed.

Additionally, it seeks to do essentially the same thing to individual users, by instituting a karma system (something that the rest of the fediverse has not coincidentally avoided, since it was and is so easily and often abused on Reddit) and by automatically collapsing responses with 10 or more downvotes (it would be child's play to use bots to deal out ten downvotes to whoever one pleased). Again, if it can attract enough users, it will then have enough clout to effectively control the narrative not just in its own communities, but throughout the fediverse.

And those potentialities, in combination with the fact that Piefed has gone from being rarely if ever even mentioned at all to, in just the last few days, being mentioned hundreds if not thousands of times a day in threads on virtually any topic, makes me highly suspicious.

My thought is that Piefed is too eager to curate my experience and too heavily promoted of late to be believably organic

It reeks of an organized, astroturfed attempt to effectively centralize the fediverse.