I am only tangentially aware what’s going with the developments so far in the developer community. I’m thinking about it and so I’m going back to how I got here from Reddit myself. These are just my two cents.

There some realities to deal with which are end user cases. I think the major push off of reddit to Lemmy was the closing of the third party apps. This is what provided Reddit usability for a large scale of its base. When developers left reddit their userbase went with them because that was the app they liked.

The benefits were clear, safety from enshittification, freedom of speech, and the same advertisement free user experience from third party apps with responsive user interfaces. It’s hard to admit there was a swath of users who probably moved because they used SYNC for Android and strongly disliked the mobile reddit UX. That whole period has cooled off now and people probably have less change energy in them now then before.

I would think that that to make a successful leap from Lemmy to Piefed, there would probably have to be a clear migration path that is relatively seamless. All communities, post history, and app compatibility would have to come with it.

Now with that being said, I wouldn’t want to burden the maintainers of any instances with additional overhead however I do trust them to be more aware of the inner workings of the systems they host than myself. Sometimes it’s worth standing up an environment to see if it’s abilities can stand the test of your use case.

For that reason alone I would be for standing up alternatives at least to try them out.

Thanks