What I think Piefed is missing: an outlier filter and a setting to disable downvotes on your own posts.

I prefer platforms that hide downvotes on my content because I don’t want to see negative vote counts on my own posts for peace of mind, yet I still want to see vote totals on other people’s content. Piefed (and Lemmy) should let users hide downvotes for their own posts while keeping voting visible elsewhere.

Also, both Lemmy and Piefed lack a good outlier filter. The Top filter floods me with memes and entertaining posts, while Lemmy’s scaled feed often shows too little of actual interest. An outlier filter that detects per-community outliers would surface more relevant content without drowning feeds in content from the popular communities.

A practical implementation would maintain a rolling baseline for each community by tracking the moving average and standard deviation of post scores at a fixed time offset (for example, one hour after submission). When a new post reaches that same offset, compute its z-score by subtracting the community’s average and dividing by the standard deviation. The filter algorithm then uses this z-score as the cross-community ranking signal: instead of sorting posts by raw score, it sorts by z-score, so posts that outperform their community’s usual activity (high positive z) rise to the top regardless of absolute score. This lets the algorithm compare posts from different communities on a common scale, surfacing outliers that are unusually engaging for their community and reducing the dominance of high-traffic communities.