I see what you're saying but it doesn't really work for me. But looking at the replies I've gotten I accept that I seem like the odd one out here.

I've been told "think of the starving children" so many times over the course of my life that it doesn't illicit a reaction for me anymore other than maybe the rolling of my eyes. If the poet wants me to actually absorb this shift in perspective I require something else, more effective and specific imagery, more concrete examples... something. Simply saying it doesn't do anything for me, and if anything it took me out of a poem I otherwise enjoyed.

But I appreciate that may be a me-problem. I may be too cynical and jaded.

Yeah, I don't like that one bit tbh.

I didn't really like the middle stanza, it's too blunt and banal somehow, I guess that's the point but it doesn't really land for me at all. "Think of the starving children" is such a cliché, "while men make decisions on who gets to live" isn't a great line to me.

And it is a shame because I really liked the first and last stanzas.

This:

The world is on fire and I'm choosing

between two kinds of soap.

is so much better. That is great. And the ending too.

I mean, I don't think they've done something this bad just yet but they also do hardcode a lot of things into the software, and some of the webpage blocks are apparently very tedious to take out if you want a politically neutral Piefed instance. They are very openly opposed to the leftists around here. Here is some recent stuff too.

There was also stuff like the implementation of flairs on Piefed deliberately declining to use ActivityPub endpoints, which made it an exclusive feature to entice users to switch instead of something Lemmy could create compatibility with, which felt kind of EEE-ey to me. Now that was years ago and I haven't kept up on development, they may have changed it around since then. I think flairs are coming in Lemmy 1.0, or something sort of like it.

And recently there was the whole vote rationing fiasco, which stemmed from some sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how voting works on a place like this by Rimu, was idiotic from the start and ultimately drove PugJesus (an incredibly valuable and active poster in tons of niche communities) permanently off the platform after they didn't back down.

EDIT: more in this comment thread too: https://piefed.social/comment/12273761

Piefed has some great features but my opinion of it hasn't been great as of late.

Getting upset because of the transitive property from a single mod's user handle on anarchist.nexus is not db0 "systematically sending death threats", though. Extraordinary accusations require extraordinary evidence.

I didn't know about the silent bans/modlog circumvention in Piefed. That's like, really really bad.

Yeah that sounds like moving alright, hah. Hope things settle down and quieten for you soon.

Trusting the victims and healthy scepticism are always at odds with each other, but in this case AdmiralPatrick has already been caught in bad faith arguments before where others have had receipts and he had nothing.

It wouldn't entirely suprise me if some nutcase actually did send him some death threat, but in this instance I'm not going to just take his word for it.

Hey, are we finally big enough for the bots to invade? That's progress!

The concept was fine - if it was correctly advertised and (ideally) given multiple options of block list curators like how you can subscribe to blocklists on in Bluesky. That would actually be a great feature, because he was right about one thing - onboarding normies to the Fediverse is a struggle.

Hiding it, actually actively obfuscating it, making it unconfigurable and bundling it with the safety/anti-spam filter is not okay. That is him trying to silently make himself arbiter of acceptable conversation on the Fediverse.

Then on top of that, you add some of the bans he included being deranged at best and possibly actively homophobic and transphobic at worst.

Yes, I believe Bluesky does exactly that - custom blocklists you can subscribe to. It would actually be a very useful feature.