I'm not a serial downvoter. I maybe downvote around 10% of what I upvote, and that's considering that I regularly browse /all and find spam that I downvote and report, so I wouldn't call myself a "mass downvoter". It was also the first (and only) time I downvoted in that community. Some mods really don't like disent. But it's fine, I only found out because I went to the modlog to check something else and found out that I was banned. I suppose if I didn't even notice that I was banned, it means I'll be able to survive the experience.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Yes, and maybe, plus no.

When individual users have more tools to work with, the mods don't have to be as authoritarian. e.g. if a bunch of people complain to a mod of a European community that there are too many posts mentioning Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then with PieFed the individual users can use the keyword filtering tools to tailor their personal view of the shared community content to accomplish that end (best of all there, the options include not only All and None but to filter Some of the content).

Another example is that by labeling highly contentious users, e.g. those who receive >10x more downvotes than upvotes, the users themselves can make the choice as to whether to engage or simply keep scrolling, i.e. providing additional options beyond simply block vs. allow. People that would otherwise be blocked will likely have their content be more exposed rather than less using this tool - or at least that's one possiblity, which Lemmy did not allow or provide for (offering only Block vs. not, with nothing whatsoever in-between).

Still another example are people who post 10x more often than comment - a potential unregistered bot account, where I guess commenting on their posts could be a waste of time if many people block that account and thus a reply on those posts is unlikely to ever be seen by an actual human?

And still another example is new accounts, less than a couple weeks old, so that your reply may be different to them than an established user.

Yes PieFed can also automatically collapse or hide content based on downvotes received. I have these features turned off but if someone wants them on, then such a person might be better off to use them, rather than feel tempted to downvote or comment on such controversial content? (Edit: imagine a world where instead of comments like "this take is disgusting, you should be ashamed of yourself for not thinking precisely as I personally do myself!", those who don't want to see such things do not have to, while those that do can have a genuine back-and-forth discussion without such noise. Good fences make good neighbors? This seems the polar opposite of an echo chamber where everyone simply MUST view the same content in one of the same identical manner of options provided, because those are the only options that the developers have deigned to allow for.)

A CRUCIAL difference here is that all of these features above are implemented at the level of individual users, making their own personal choices about what they want to see or not see. Lemmy mainly provides features to instance admins and community mods, but by shifting the choices downwards to the user level, it's a whole new era in content management, having democratized the process, or at least allowing more for that, rather than leaving all the capabilities - along with all the responsibilities - in the hands of the authority figures higher up in the hierarchy?

I will leave it as an exercise to prove whether putting power into the hands of the people rather than concentrating it into the hands of a few is "good" or not (my personal opinion is that it's great!), but objectively PieFed seems to offer far more "freedom" to end-users than Lemmy, as I understand it. (Edit: I guess I am saying that if Lemmy is akin to Windows where Big Daddy is always right, not only but especially when he is wrong:-P, because that is simply the only option made available to people - to either stay or go, fully block or fully allow, nothing in-between is provided for - then PieFed is Linux leaving it up to the user to decide individually what is right for them, by tailoring their customization options to suit their desires. Yes that theoretically could lead to an echo chamber where everyone must use a wide variety of flavors of Linux, in which case yes some could make the "wrong" choice - although I would argue there, why is it wrong if that is what they desire? - but don't forget that the alternative is somehow even more of an echo chamber where everyone must use Windows, so I for one don't see the addition of these new features as a bad thing? I suppose time will tell.)

I care about that far less than I care about not having every vote I cast recorded forever by anyone subscribed to the fediverse feed. I care about that far less than power tripping mods and admins being terminally online and using that vote for censorship purposes.

At the end of the day, brigading is mostly an ego thing anyway. If you just stop caring about votes then they can't hurt you.

Having votes be public doesn't actually fix the astroturfing problem anyway since it's still possible to just create sockpuppet accounts anyway. To a bad actors, it doesn't matter if that sockpuppet is voting from the plaintext user string, or an agent pseudonym. Someone who wants to bot farm the fediverse will still make it happen.

If anything, public votes will make the inevitable enshitification of the fediverse worse, because it will give the viral marketing and political sockpuppet accounts more engagement to parse.