I never saw the point of these at all somehow, but maybe someone can explain how I'm wrong (because I may well be!):
The way I understand guppe groups worked is that you could create any group simply by tagging or following any string followed by a.gup.pe. But those groups didn't have moderators or owners or anything like that. How is that different from following a hashtag?
Threadiverse communities differ from following hashtags by having moderators who can remove posts or ban users. That provides extra value because that means people can't post spam or off-topic things in them as long as the mods are doing their jobs. But if that isn't possible, then why not just follow a hashtag and post to it?
In any case, it seems that federation to Lemmy never worked properly, it was possible to see that guppe groups existed on Lemmy, but they didn't accept my follow request and (maybe because of this?) didn't federate at least to my instance: https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/openstreetmap@a.gup.pe and https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/retrogaming@a.gup.pe are both empty despite me being in "subscribe pending" state on them.