So Piefed sends me a PM when actions have been taken against my account/content?

Honestly I do not know - Notifications on PieFed, along with searching, are both features that are still a bit wonky and behind everything else. Side-note: you will legit want to keep your old Lemmy account, and use it especially for searching for content, and also if you choose piefed.social whenever that goes down for upgrades, which it does far more often than a normal instance (it literally says that btw, it deploys new features sooner than other instances so it is the "test bed" to try them out:-D but if that bothers you then use one of the other ones like piefed.zip, piefed.world, etc.).

So that one may be a bad example for me to use... but on the other hand, Lemmy has been out for YEARS and that feature requested for YEARS, whereas PieFed is still being built and new features are added WEEKLY. So I would expect to see that feature "soon" on PieFed, whereas on Lemmy I would expect to see it "never" (b/c of the authoritarian mindset precluding them even wanting to do it). Just like so many other of the continually growing set of features offered by PieFed.

Not to get too deep into the tankie bashing, but nevertheless it does seem worth pointing out that the philosophies of the Lemmy devs have gotten them into some financial trouble, as people do not want to interact with them, e.g. to first learn the super-difficult (even compared to C++!!) Rust coding language and then try to contribute code. In contrast, pretty much every programmer already knows Python and so a lot of people can - and do - contribute to PieFed.

TLDR: PieFed is so much newer than Lemmy and honestly it is a bit behind in some ways, but even so PieFed is already running circles around Lemmy in not only the pace of development but also the raw set of features already developed.

And if I can add: even Reddit stopped adding features YEARS ago, unless you count things like those Doge coins that generate profit for the company but do not add anything new to the user-base. To see a thread-based forum platform actively adding brand-new features... damn it is so refreshing! (and yes Lemmy does that too, but on the scale of YEARS rather than, again, mere WEEKS)

when a lemmy instance, community bans you, it doesnt notify you of it

I just mentioned this in another comment but I'll add it here so you can see it more easily:

25-fold iirc, b/c on the one hand it uses a LOT less data per post, plus it shows 5x more posts by default, so less need to paginate and such.

Here is a post describing that in detail: Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed

I wouldn't hold my breath, I'm on the Zulip (https://chat.piefed.social/ ) and Matrix chats and the migration script isn't really worked on by anyone.

Instances like quokk.au just went nuclear and recreated their instances with Piefed when keeping the domain name.

https://piefed.blahaj.zone/ went the subdomain route.

• https://piefed.zip/
• https://piefed.social/
• https://piefed.ca/
• https://piefed.world/

Hey, to be fair it’s all public in the modlog. They have weird geopolitical ideas, but I don’t see a lot of ways it’s influenced the design of the platform.

It's not though. You not only do not receive a notification, unlike Reddit btw, but you also can't message the person who did it, also unlike Reddit btw, and on top of that, the modlog simply says that it was done by a "mod", so you can't DM them either unless you DM every single mod in the entire community (tbf Reddit does NOT show which mod did something, but in that case you still have the shared modmail so there was no actual need to have it).

Even weirder, I remember when this feature was added: it used to always show the account of the mod, but over time it has become even more authoritian than it used to be. I am saying that Lemmy is somehow even more authoritian than Reddit itself. Instance admins and to a lesser degree mods have tremendous freedoms, whereas the end users not so much. The devs left Reddit, but how Reddit operated still seems very much prominent in their minds, except when they choose to do differently and yes, enormous kudos that there is a modlog, but without notifications of an event or a modmail it still on balance ends up being MORE authoritian than Reddit.

Whereas PieFed offers numerous features aimed at the democratization of moderation, allowing mods to be more hands-off and leave the end-user to decide what they want to see, possibly enlisting the aid of the entire community. e.g. one of the first things PieFed does with a new account is a sign-up wizard asking what their interests are and subscribing to communities based on the answers, and as part of that asking if the user would like to block All, Some, or None of any keywords the user would like, such as "Trump" or "Musk". This allows mods to have additional options beyond simply remove that content vs. allow it: now, they can more readily allow it knowing that the users that are super tired of seeing it all the time have a means to see less of it, provided by the automated software (which also reduces the burden of manual moderation tasks too).

Sorry this is getting long and you had other questions but I wanted to point out that the pro-democracy stance of PieFed's democratization of moderation and the pro-authoritarian stance (not from the perspective of an instance admin but to the end-users themselves) is very much baked into the code and a large part of the overall experiences, as it shapes what content is allowed to show up on the respective platforms.

Okay, that does sound dope. How is it implemented? Does it only work if the commenter is on PieFed?

It brings all comments together across all communities, both PieFed and Lemmy - it is one of PieFed's most popular features! Here is an example showing 9 cross-posts where the comments are all brought together: https://piefed.social/post/1189671 (except I have Lemmy.ml blocked so those comments properly don't show up for my account:-) - note clicking the horizontal lines shows the community sidebar with explanation and rules for each one.

As you said, it really helps posts to smaller communities maintain traction rather than get ignored by the masses of Lemmings, with that automated software feature allowing Pie-heads to be more connected across the Fediverse.:-)