You know what would really help? If these authors included links to the websites where readers could immediately voice their support of these petitions before the deadline is up. We have until Dec 7:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/28/2026-21939/exemptions-to-permit-circumvention-of-access-controls-on-copyrighted-works

Click the message icon -> Submit a public comment

You can find the section of the document summarizing these petitions if you do a ctrl+F on the page and search for “Jayden” and then “Zakaria”.

Note - Technically the author has this link, but it’s obscured under a statement of how the Copyright Office “has repeatedly declined to recommend” changes in the past.

Some useful excerpts:

One of these petitions comes from Jayden Milne. He asks the Office to allow owners of DVDs, Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray discs to make a single secured, local copy for personal use, when the digital copy promised on the packaging is no longer available.
[…]
A second and related petition, submitted by Zakaria Zerhouane, focuses on anime more broadly. It covers series and films that were removed from authorized U.S. streaming platforms after their licenses expired, as well as anime released on disc by U.S. distributors that no longer exist.
[…]
In addition to bypassing encryption on discs, Zerhouane also wants to legally circumvent the DRM, geo-locking, and session-based access controls that streaming platforms use. This is needed, the petition argues, as the anime licensing market is unstable.

I remember an interesting 3D space that showed just about every part of the fediverse.

I think it was this one, but it doesn’t look like the website is running anymore:
https://github.com/fediversespace/fediverse.space

What exactly are your concerns with voting?

On any fediverse software, ActivityPub is going to be sharing your vote records. PieFed gives you a little more control and lets you lock down those votes to only be shared with your own instance, with “trusted” instances, or with everyone.

With Lemmy you can create an instance that forces it so that downvotes are not an option.

With PieFed you have a little more control. You can create a community that accepts downvotes from:

• Everyone
• Nobody
• Community Members
• Local Instance only
• Trusted Instances

End users across both Lemmy and PieFed ultimately decide how they view content in their feed and whether votes factor in at all.

Even if you disable downvotes on your particular instance/software, that doesn’t stop other instances from tracking upvotes/downvotes in their own way, locally. At most the main instance hosting the community won’t be federating out the downvote information from one instance to another.

The way you describe topics in your anti-echo-chamber forum sounds like it fits better with the way PieFed handles Topics and flair on posts, but it’s different enough that I can sort of see what you’re getting at.

As far as controlling how spaces/topics are organized, and looking at your chart, which instance would ultimately be in charge of that? Would it be the largest instance and smaller instances are expected to follow? What if a smaller instance organized the topics in its own way?

The way PieFed handles this is that each instance is in charge of their own Topics. Users can only view the topics that their instance provides, although they can be organized in a similar way to one another.

Currently working on transitioning the Star Citizen community from a Lemmy instance to a PieFed one. Looking forward to taking advantage of all the features that PieFed has to offer!