Redditors, who are primarily USA Christian centrists, will never join someplace where extremists are constantly calling for Luigi-ing everyone in any Western civilizations.
Try it: make an account on lemmy.ml and use it for a day, and make an account on a PieFed instance and do the same. The feature differences are enormous - as too are those that you do not readily see, such as the fact that moderator reports actually federate on one of those two platforms but not the other (tbf they will eventually in an upcoming release).
You will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome if do this experiment.
Tbf, a TON of information surrounding that issue turned out to be false. Though at its core you may be correct - and yet the same is also true of Lemmy?
Especially in the past, like when Lemmy at first hard-coded a slur word filter (in English no less), and in response Nutomic told people that... well, read for yourself:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
(Though they later relented.)
PieFed is not perfectly administered (Rimu admitted this, and stepped back from being the sole leader of the project), and neither is Lemmy. Both are imperfect software tools, both offered as FOSS. Yay - we all win with that philosophy!!
At the end of the day though, if someone is relying upon a free instance service, then it is up to those instance admins to decide their policies, while your only choice is which one you will be beholden to. This too is not different from how Lemmy works, though one difference is in how extremely FAST PieFed develops new features, and also in how responsive the devs are. I don't blame anyone for choosing not to move, but objectively speaking I don't see Lemmy passing any purity tests more often than PieFed - especially given how it is way easier to install a personal PieFed instance than a Lemmy one.
But which upvote type - boosts or votes? Why do boosts exist at all then, if they don't "boost" anything? I thought I remembered (granted it's been a couple of years since I migrated from Reddit to kbin.social) that it was boosts, and it was upvotes that existed but were irrelevant? (If so, but not anymore, then how and why was that changed?)
Not that you need to answer every one of these - I'm just sharing my confusion, which many people seem to also share.
That's likely an Mbin issue. Ernst, the creator of the original product Kbin before it got forked and taken over as Mbin, made a confusing decision to have both upvotes and boosts together, and not just on the microblog (Mastodon) side with magazines but even side-by-side also on the Threadiverse with communities. So when you press the "upvote"... I forget which action even occurs - upvoting vs. boosting. Sorting by votes also gets very wonky.
And yes, all those weird design decisions very much scare people away from Mbin: the largest Mbin instance has only <500 active accounts and all Mbin instances combined have mere hundreds of users. For comparison, the flagship PieFed instance has >1k users, the NSFW one has twice that, and Lemmy.world alone has >13k!!!
It is possible to see those numbers, it's just super janky. If you click on the upvote count in a web browser, a tooltip pops up showing the breakdown of up vs. down votes. Usually... well, sometimes. It helps to zoom way far in and hit it exactly in the center of the number.
I miss Lemmy's better UI presentation of things, and also its vastly superior searching, but otherwise PieFed seems better in every way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1qm1uq1/lets_settle_the_reddit_alternative_discussion/
TLDR: here is a very long list of things that Lemmy will need to do in order to get people on Reddit to try it. Btw PieFed already does most of them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/
Pretty much what I said earlier.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/143o5xd/reconsidering_my_support_for_lemmy/
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/170ie8t/regarding_the_recent_complaints_about_lemmy_being/
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16zq1dd/the_lemmyverse_aint_all_its_cracked_up_to_be/
This list could go on all day.