IMO the greatest strength of piefed is the built in on-boarding to kick start your subscriptions to not feel so empty (since you don't have any communities subscribed yet or you joined a smaller instance) or too overwhelming (since you joined a big instance and browse All). I signed on piefed.social a year ago and that is what made me stay over the last 2 attempts. A solid foundation to replace the algorithm in reddit. The crosspost support and collecting comments from same posts in different comms is the brick walls and cement for that foundation.

And when the vote quota shit happened, I jumped to .zip because they practically disabled it (IIRC it cannot be turned off, but zip admin just make it impossibly high. It might have changed by now idk (regarding can't be turned off))

and from some mentions I've seen occasionally piefed also has better mod tools. don't quote me on that, can't really vouch.