There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website's technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World's lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don't know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

A simple score isn't going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.

(Lets forget about the part when one guy started copying entire threads including their users, which was not well thought out)

That was me. ;)

And sorry to disappoint you, I thought about it a lot. Mirroring the entire thread was less about the benefit the (few) users that are here and more about the potential to bring the masses of Reddit users who are stuck there because they (rightfully) claim that they do not have any other place to find their niche content. Mirroring the entire thread was also a way to ensure that we were (a) breaking the monopoly on the conversation and (b) creating an incentive for app developers to create a hybrid Lemmy/Reddit client, that could read from Lemmy and post to both, which would effectively make the transition away from the siloed network completely transparent.

The one thing that I didn't get to execute properly was that I should've completed the two-way bridging before enabling the full mirrors.

A Lemmy instance is not just a basket for specific topics, it’s a expression of ideology...

1. This is booooooring. So boring. This is the kind of thing that keeps people away. To the absolute majority of people, social networks are about FFF: Friends, Family and Fucking.
2. It's not an exclusive option. If you are part of 5% of people who want to be in the small, niche group are still free to do so. The other 95% of people who just care about gorging in from the content hose would be perfectly happy by following from the larger topic-based instances.

A slow and steady promotion of lemmy is the best that can happen

This is what the Mastodon crowd would also say. Now they are seeing constant churn and watching Bluesky grow, and have to bury their faces in the sand arguing stupid things like "Bluesky might be winning, but they are not really decentralized". Yeah, it is true. It's not "really" decentralized. 99.98% of the world will say "so what?" and continue to use it.

I'm tired of consolation prizes and moral victories. I want the web to be free, and I want it to be free for more than just a tiny niche of ideologues. Slow and steady will not win against Big Tech.

Not Fediverser per se but the underlying concepts. In detail:

Content is King

Here, PieFed is no better nor worse than Lemmy. It uses ActivityPub to connect with Lemmy, as well as having its own communities, like Mbin (except unlike the latter it doesn't have its own separate voting system, nor does it federate with Mastodon).

One thing PieFed does have though is the ability for someone to block all users from a particular instance of their choice, without requiring admin approval. This helps SO MUCH for certain instances that nobody wants to defederate from... yet I don't want to read content from either.

Painless onboarding is second. Fediverser is meant to help with that, but no other admin has shown interest in adopting it.

There is a wizard where you choose what content you want to see - News, Politics, Arts & Craft, Technology, Movies & TV, Science, etc. - which then signs you up to communities in those Topic areas. You can later unsubscribe or subscribe to any individual communities that you wish, but the wizard helps the onboarding process so that you don't have to simply stare at All bc your Subscribed feed is initially empty, as Lemmy does, bc on PieFed it would not be empty. It thus makes it much easier to find less prominent content, such as poetry, that would otherwise get swamped out by all the memes and politics and such.

A clear way to find-what-goes-where is third.

There are Categories of Communities that combine posts from all of the topic areas, whether you joined those communities or not. So if you don't want any politics filling your feed, yet you occasionally do want to look up something related to politics, it is just one click away. So not quite mapping specifically to Reddit subs, but yes mapping to content areas - which imho is so much better, bc that would also help someone migrating not just from Reddit but from X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or Lemmy, etc. You don't need an account to see this feature btw - just visit piefed.social/ and look at the top.

Or here is an example post showing the Categories above the post, hashtags below it, YouTube embedding of the link, a link to watch that rather on Piped, and if you scroll down note how the sidebar text appears below every single post (some apps make that exceedingly difficult to find on Lemmy, but it's very often helpful to see not just when on the community page, and rather when in an individual post, e.g. to read the rules).

Does it provide a separation between topic instances and user instances?

No, there are extremely few instances so far and the whole project is still in late alpha as it adds features to catch up to Lemmy, although as detailed above it already has many features that Lemmy lacks. And I didn't even begin to get into some of the best thoughts for how to democratize moderation practices to rely less on authoritarian control of "remove" vs. "allow" content, by expanding upon those binary choices to include user options to control their own experience - e.g. automatically collapse any comment with >20 downvotes (though it can easily be uncollapsed with one click), and labels next to usernames (e.g. "account <2 weeks old", "may be an unregistered bot account that posts but never comments", "controversial user receiving >50x downvotes than upvotes", etc. - except these are icons not words as I relate here, plus you can add your own icons whenever and to whoever you wish, that only you will see, on top of these conditional-based ones), and even more than this besides.

When it catches up to feature parity with Lemmy, damn it's going to be so exciting! Right now it's more of a future thought, except I (who know how to fall back to Lemmy when the occasion demands, e.g. when searching for a post) already use it as my primary daily driver - not that I would recommend that mind you, just saying that it's possible, if that gives you any indication as to how close it is to being ready for the masses. It's very close, I do believe!

It's been too long, but there might be a way to click all at once or some such. But those are details, compared to Lemmy that has All or None (and empty Subscribed), with nothing whatsoever in-between. It's a step in the right direction I am saying.

Nothing will ever entirely "solve" anything at all - people even on Reddit complain about "lack of content". There's tons of content here though, it just gets really difficult to find it. However, check out this link for Arts & Crafts. There are lots and lots of posts there - PieFed shows like 5x more in a listing than Lemmy - virtually none of which would make their way to All bc of being swamped out, and yet if that is the content that people are TRULY looking for... this brings them straight to it, with one click! Why isn't that a "solve", at least for the issue of content discovery?

Then they can subscribe to the communities they want to see in their Subscribed feed, which is less relevant due to being able to use those Categories. Also you can trigger a Notification for anything at all on PieFed - a user account, a community, a post, and I especially love seeing that you can turn OFF notifications for a particular comment, if abusive trolls decide to spam you for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, which is a real story that has happened to me at least twice on Lemmy, once on hexbear.net and another on lemmygrad.ml - in either case, my consent ceased long before they eventually got tired of harassing me (in fairness, that is supposedly what communities such as !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net are for, so it's not that I want the community to cease to exist so much as to not have its content promoted as if it were adopting the same standards of behavior as every other space that I was used to across the Fediverse, without at least a warning of some kind delivered, which is yet another beneficial capability that PieFed offers).

So in addition to Categories and Subscriptions, I also have Notifications sent to me for lesser-trafficked but highly desirable content for me to see like !tenforward@lemmy.world. And sometime this year there will be yet another method of handling all of this, in user-defined topic areas like a Favorites or other category of content that the user asks to be separated from all the rest.

And respectfully I disagree, bc depending on implementation, Categories of Communities has the advantage that it could make discovery of new communities obsolete - e.g. if there's a !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com and a !lotrmemes@midwest.social, it could put both of those into the same Category, and isn't that what you are essentially asking: that wherever the content ends up moving, that the software go and find it and bring it to you, wherever you happen to be at?

Granted, the solution that PieFed offers needs to be improved upon:-), but at least it exists now.