I am responding to you from PieFed right now, so yes that works:-).

Sublinks plans to go even further and be backwards compatible with existing Lemmy databases, for conversion of current instances rather than having to spin up a new one fresh and thereby lose all the old content.

Mbin likewise ties in not only with Lemmy but with Mastodon as well (plus others such as Friendica can connect with Lemmy as well, but with varying degrees of success).

So I get what you are saying, I do, but also if some features - like hashtag support - aren’t supported by all platforms, then the method of access can have such an enormous difference in terms of what “content” someone is able to access, even if staring at raw API calls from those various sources, that it seems to represent more than merely a method of access to the same material (imho at least).

More to the point, I meant that PieFed is written in Python (and Sublinks in Java iirc, and Mbin in PHP), whereas Lemmy written in Rust moves much more slowly ahead in terms of new features, as far fewer people know it.

Also the developers of Lemmy have a very noticeable bias towards authoritarianism that influences what the implementation is allowed to do - e.g. when a mod or admin removes content, there is no user notification nor any way to appeal that (as Reddit does with the modmail), and an entire post thereby disappears even for the users having deeper discussions no longer involving the OP, which end up getting squashed as well.

I doubt that will change even in the timeframe of several years, especially considering how a year ago Lemmy users were told that we would gain the ability to block users from an instance, which when the feature rolled out that only mutes communities but leaves all the trolls free to harass users on other instances that haven’t dared to defederated from them, showed us that the promises made in that regard were not serious. e.g. from Hexbear or even mods on Lemmy.ml, like that incident where the mod told a user “I hope you die soon.”, after saying that they - the mod - wanted to kill the user whose comment they had removed, over some trivial depiction of a kiss between people dating in a game. Yet to this day that same mod retains an account on that instance, protected by the admins and free to continue their pattern of abuse across the entire Fediverse. Moreover, “notifications” from instances that people choose to block used to be silenced, but then that protection was later removed, and to this day there remains no way in the Lemmy web UI to halt a barrage of messages from users that can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS (I’m not joking - this has happened to me, TWICE!), long after the person has lost interest in receiving such. (Tbf, some apps may provide that, I’m not sure, but I’m talking here about what “Lemmy” provides innately.)

TLDR: I’ve mostly given up on Lemmy - the platform I mean, not the users on it - to ever improve such matters. At which point I am pinning my hopes on PieFed, Mbin, and Sublinks moving forward, bc those “minor differences” in the codebase make ALL the difference in terms of avoidance of harassment i.e. the reception of the end user experience.