Okay, so, FOSS.

If WordPress doesn't want WP Engine doing what it's doing, they need to change their license. It's not "Free Open Source Software Until Something We Don't Like Happens."

FINALLY. BT+DD

Amazon SES is dirt cheap, billed per-send, you just need to bring the Everything Else with something like Mailcoach or Sendy.

Isn't that what mbin is?

Gotify. Home Assistant. DDClient.

Ah fuck! I mistook the piefed docs for the pixelfed docs.

I swear there was documentation there.

No, the utility is to remove bad users.

I think you're conflating my two separate concerns. One's automated vote manipulation. The other is targeted harassment.

Looks like it's kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it's a bitch without an API.

If I have an insightful contributer who's going out of their way and outside of their normal communities to be a dick to another user, maybe they're not so insightful after all. Or they've got a great reason!

Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.

mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

I'm speaking as an admin, not as a mod. I own the servers. I have direct access to the databases. When law enforcement comes a'knockin', it's my ass that gets arrested. I have total control over my instances and can completely sever them from the fediverse if I feel it necessary. Mods are mall cops that can lock posts and deal with problem users one at a time.

On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other)

There are no built in automations. Decoupling votes from the users that cast them interferes with my ability to "take care of this type of thing."

Wow your documentation is so much better than ours.

PieFed tracks the percentage of downvotes vs upvotes (calling it “Attitude” in the code and admin UI)

That's cool. I wonder what my attitude is and I wonder how accurate the score is, if our federations don't overlap super well. What happens if I have a ton of interactions on an instance that yours is completely unaware of?

(I think "Attitude" is a perfect word, because it's perceptive. Like, "you say they're great but all I see them do is get drunk and complain about how every Pokemon after Mewtwo isn't 'legit'," sort of thing.)