this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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What is that?
piefed.social keeps a hidden trust score that goes down when people do stuff the piefed dev personally doesn't like. there was recently a bunch of drama about it
Jesus fuck.
It's literally just a number admins can use to sus out if a user might potentially be a toll. It's basically reddit karma but hidden from everyone but admins.
.ml users tried to make it a big deal because people were leaving lemmy for PieFed.
Reddit Karma is not good, I don't want a Karma system on the Fediverse. That was one of the worst things about Reddit. Karma is essentially ass-kissing points, you get them for kissing ass, and you loose them for making people butt-hurt.
I can't support that, it creates nasty psychological patterns that make people prone to siding with popularity and not with what's right.
You dont have a karma system on the fediverse, only admins can see it.
Individuals dont know what their score is, there is no benefit to them trying to farm it because they cant see or use it. There is no psychological pattern formed because its an admin only tool.
This is the most overblown criticism of piefed around.
It's a score that is controlled by other people, which causes restrictions if it gets too low.
It's moderation by popularity. I can't and won't support that.
It causes zero restrictions if it gets too low, all that happens is admins see a red ! next to a username.
Why do you tankies always lie
Every account has a Social Credit Score, you concede that.
If your account has less than 100 Social Credit Score and is newly created, you are not considered “trustworthy” and there are limitations placed on what your account can do.
If your Social Credit Score is at -10 you cannot downvote, you can’t create new DMs and It flags your account automatically like this:
PieFed uses a hard coded list to rank an instances' defederation list for its quality. If an instance doesn't defederate from what Rimu decided the instances stated quality goes down. Ironically none of the paedo instances are on Rimu's list.
I think piefed's biggest proponents lie about this because it is one of the more unappealing aspects of piefed, and there isn't really a way to sugarcoat it. Social credit score based on the votes of others is just a shitty way of running a social platform.
Humans as social creatures already have innate fear of social rejection, and Karma/Social Credit systems on platforms that punish rejection just feed that dark pattern even more aggressively. It's really not something I would elect to use after going through Reddit's version of Karma. Especially because Piefed's is ever more conditional (they can blacklist communities from counting towards your score positively but you still lose score points from those communities).
Then make it a clear, public figure. Make it transparent.
Why? It’s an admin tool.
Users overall don't want karma farming accounts.
Because this is Lemmy, the whole point for me at least being decentralized, democratized; making non-privacy based knowledge exclusive to the effective elites goes against that principle to me. Perhaps that's not why you're here, but it does matter to me. It's the same reason I think the Modlog is a vital part of the Lemmy appeal; more transparency with users as community members, not just customers.
There is nothing “democratised” about Lemmy. No where in the software does it support that any more Reddit does. It still relies on admins and mods making decisions.
The only thing on offer is decentralised content aggregation.
And why would you want karma farming accounts? They were the worst part of the reddit experience.
I did not argue for karma, I argued that if karma exists, it should be public. I am at least equally happy with such score not existing for Piefed admins either.