rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral

I'll believe it when I see it.

It's an odd thing - the Lemmy devs are notoriously opinionated and intolerant, and are constantly castigated for it, but I don't recall ever seeing even a single hint of their opinions or even their intolerance baked into the Lemmy software.

Piefed, meanwhile, is a direct reflection of the dev's biases right from the start, and with everything from the curated subscription lists to the karma and private voting, seems designed explicitly for the purpose of empowering bias.

Say what you will about Dessalines and Nutomic - at least they keep their biases to their own instance and out of the Lemmy software. And further, they appear to have gone to some lengths to make the software as neutral as possible - not only not reflecting any specific bias but limited in ways that make it difficult for it to even be used to impose bias.

And the same can NOT be said for Rimu and Piefed.

It tracks karma, automatically collapses replies and hides threads based on downvote thresholds and attaches icons to usernames to tell other users in advance that they have been downvoted in the past. And alongside that, votes are hidden. So a few determined users (or even one determined user and a few bots) can easily silence other users or even effectively censor content just by mass downvoting.

Just like Reddit, and notably NOT like the rest of the threadiverse which has done away with karma, doesn't auto-hide downvoted users or content snd makes votes public.