PieFed Meta

You are now on the "Threadiverse", the subset of the Fediverse (interconnected software using the ActivityPub Protocol to communicate) that uses threaded-based discussions centered around communities, unlike e.g. the user-centric microblogging platforms that most people think of when you say "Fediverse" (aka Mastodon, the Twitter/X replacement, although btw we call the latter Xhitter bc it is perfectly just the right amount of derogatory:-P).

Software in the Threadiverse includes Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin that combines both threaded-based Threadiverse and user-centric microblogging Fediverse. Also nodeBB, flarum at one point was said to be joining it, and there were some other projects that died out (Sublinks).

In the wider Fediverse there is also Friendica (Facebook replacement), Pixelfed (Instagram replacement), Loops (I forget if federation is enabled for that yet, Tiktok replacement), and so on. Theoretically they can all talk to one another using the ActivityPub Protocol, and being on PieFed you will occasionally see comments or even posts from any/all/most of these, but in practice each type of content is more optimized for the platform that it is aimed at, and the interconnections are clunky. e.g. PieFed has so many more features than Lemmy that the latter doesn't know what to do with, so it has to simply ignore it - e.g. user polls, or user or post flairs, etc.

Most of the time though, Lemmy and PieFed are seamlessly interconnected. e.g. some of the people replying to you are on PieFed instances, while others are on servers running Lemmy, and unless you dig a bit into each one individually, you can't really even tell which are which at a glance. The Threadiverse is just great that way - like on Reddit (The Bad Place), if a single person (Steve Huffman) did not like something, then nobody can argue against him, whereas here, if you get banned then in the worst case someone can spin up their own personal instance (running PieFed, Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, or whatever) and still be connected to the same identical network - here someone is known by their reputation, not landed gentry whose attention is sold to advertising firms for the sake of profits.