Piefed and Lemmy are act-pub/fediverse software systems, same with Mastodon and many others. Since Lemmy and Piefed are so similar in their structure though as link aggregators that people vote and comment on you could think of them as the same network with different clients.

I switched from Lemmy to Piefed somewhere around piefed’s 1.15 version as I recall. On a technical front Piefed is a solid margin ahead in admin and usability features, at least as of when I switched. I haven’t noticed a major performance difference, but mine is a single user instance so that might be better shown at a larger scale. Lemmy was a bit easier to deploy initially since there wasn’t a need to have anything compile locally but rather just pull an image and go.

Ethically, I’m less concerned using Piefed than Lemmy. The devs of Lemmy are notoriously vocal in their support of Russia/China/Korea, and basically anything that could be considered in opposition of western liberal/progressive policies. This is troublesome since there is the potential for updates being made that help create even more aggressively divisive bubbles than we already have in many parts of the fedi. Those could be applied to any software of course, but the Lemmy devs make their stances quite visible in that regard.