- A lot of people on the Threadiverse refuse to donate to Lemmy due to their beliefs, which hinders future growth of the code.
- A lot of people on Reddit or X or Facebook hear about the devs and immediately nope out of the entire Threadiverse, possibly going instead to Bluesky.
So PieFed is great for the health and growth not just of itself but for the entire Threadiverse, imho. And then seeing how well and which features are most popular in PieFed, Lemmy can copy to improve experience on that side. Also as people leave Lemmy - e.g. lemm.ee shutting down was a major event but even more relevant is the overall reduction in number of active users, from ~55k in the peak after Rexodus to only ~35k today - then hopefully PieFed can at least entice some of those who are definitely leaving Lemmy to remain at least in the wider Threadiverse.
That said, as Lemmy moves forward so slowly, increasingly it is going to miss out on an ever-growing share of what that wider Threadiverse offers. e.g. polls and hashtags, neither of which I see mentioned in the planned 1.0 release. Every single post, if Lemmy can render it at all (it can't for polls) will lack information that only shows on PieFed. And with funding, active user counts, and number of new instances all decreasing... this going to affect Lemmy further. Most of that would have happened anyway regardless of whether PieFed existed though, so again I am glad for the latter since otherwise people would just leave the Threadiverse entirely. e.g. here is one such very interesting irl story: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed.