And the unnatural and extremely sudden increase in mentions - over just the last week or so, it’s gone from Piefed almost never being mentioned anywhere to it being mentioned in hundreds if not thousands of threads a day. That also makes me suspicious.

It was gaining momentum anyway, but the big reason was the collapse of lemm.ee - which held many medium-sized communities having to find a new home. A lot (not all) chose piefed.

Piefed isn’t a centralised system itself. There isn’t just one Piefed instance.

That’s a strange comparison. I imagine someone who objects to the politics of the lemmy developers would also object to similar political expression said by anyone.

Yes.

https://piefed.social/f/forumverse

This is the feed proper being referred to here.

It’s similar to multifeeds on reddit, except Piefed makes them much more visible and useful for sharing.

I think the real answer is less advocating against Piefed (which is getting some preference thanks to QoL additions for community management, I think), but rather advocate for some of the larger communities moving to Piefed to spin up a whole new instance.

This is happening by the way. Many lemmy communities are making their own instances based on Piefed. And the good news about Piefed is that community transferring is built in, so once larger more supported instances move over, it will be viable for any .social community to transfer over.

Even though I initially started out on kbin when I attempted this on the fediverse (because of its rich feature depth), it was pretty overdesigned in my opinion.

To a degree, but not every lemm.ee community has moved to piefed - and other piefed instances (made by people with active lemmy instances are emerging)