I’d make a recommendation: have some sort of cross-pollination tool. Basically, pull the database of all subscribed communities on Lemmy.ca and have a bot subscribe to the same on PieFed, and vice versa. Probably easy to do if you have server-side access.
This is actually somewhat built into PieFed. Users can import from a lemmy account, and admins can do a bulk community import of the local communities on a particular instance (filtering by number of posts and users in the past week in those communities). However, it's buggy. Eventually it would be nice to have tools to synchronize administration between the instances so that we don't need to repeat actions on both instances.
Furthermore, in the ideal world, “Local” from the Lemmy instance includes the piefed.ca local commuities. This might be a harder ask. The reason would be to prevent bisecting the Local feeds.
Agreed :) PieFed does have a 'popular' feed, so another solution would be to have a default feed that we have more control over (ex. picking specific instances or communities). As long as the exact breakdown is communicated to the user, perhaps as a 'learn more' button in the existing "Create an account to tailor this feed to your interests.", I don't think people will mind the admins customizing it to fit the instance. We've discussed in the past whether it is better to have the default logged out view be 'local' or 'popular', and this might help with that problem too.
Finally, ideally there is a community migration tool, to cross between Lemmy and PieFed if a community wants to move from one side to the other
This actually exists for the Lemmy -> PieFed direction! @blaze posted some information about it here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/16976004
It could be better, since right now while the PieFed instance does get a copy of all the posts, the Lemmy instance doesn't know about it. Hopefully the various platforms can coordinate some common solution.
Also happy cake day! 🥳
Thank you so much for this medal, I will cherish it 😁