That ping did not federate :)

I agree - PieFed is almost ready. But not yet, and it would be rash to migrate to PieFed today.

The state of PieFed currently:

• In the last week two new developers have started making significant contributions, so now there are 3 of us. Once they get more comfortable there could be a radical increase in development velocity.
• I've been making steady progress through the key issues that will enable me to declare the 'beta test' phase complete. I expect the beta test phase to continue for another couple of months.
• piefed.social is subscribed to over 700 communities and handling the load of federation very well (max 50% cpu usage), on a server costing 6 € per month. The number of weekly users is about 20% of what Beehaw has but PieFed is built to run very efficiently so I do not anticipate issues there.
• mod tools on piefed are being worked on right now but are not ready. I am aiming to eventually complete the wish list at https://beehaw.org/comment/397674.

Some differences between Lemmy and PieFed

• Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
• Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
• Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/pics@lemmy.world
• People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
• Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
• Keyboard shortcuts.
• Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
• Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
• Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)

If you have not tried PieFed yet, I urge you to do so as it's the only way to really see it's potential.