I asked that question recently and got some helpful responses,

https://lemmy.world/post/30977919

tl;dr PieFed has different people behind it, a few more features, and is written in Python instead of Rust (I’m not a coder or an instance host, so don’t ask me what that distinction means, but I’ve anecdotally seen more people saying python is easier to work with than rust than the other way around),

PieFed communities federate with Lemmy communities, tho, so no matter which kind of instance you’re going through as a user you should be able to interact with all the communities (assuming your instance admins haven’t decided to defederate with the other instance for some reason)

the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.

Agreed, and I would add that finding ways to get nonprofit news organizations (e.g. ProPublica) and public media (e.g. NPR, PBS, etc.) to host and administer their own instances and to start directing their readers/listeners to those services would be a great way to advance this goal