I did hope so.

Technically I still do, but it's all so terribly complicated that it scares people away - Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin, and then what experience someone would get from each individual instance, like how are things on PieFed.zip vs. PieFed.social vs. quokk.au.

All of which allow exposure to tankies on Lemmy.ml, thus requiring effort on behalf of the new users to first discover the controversy and decide what to do about it, and then figure out ways to implement their decision (which as with pretty much everything else is far easier on PieFed than Lemmy).

We have a reputation problem, and PieFed does little to solve that. I once placed strong hopes that the "instance chooser" in particular would help, but that hope has not turned into reality.