The platform splits literally don’t matter.

1. That’s the point of open source, being able to make your own fork.

2. The backend is AP not Lemmy, Kbin, mastodon, or piefed

The fragmented ecosystem of ideas doesn’t really exist except in a few servers such as beehaw, lemmygrad, and hexbear. Beehaw and hexbear don’t even care about federation.

Being subscription based is what makes it feasible for smaller instances to exist on the fediverse. If every instance had to be a full mirror of the network only a few small groups could afford to host instances.

I would curious to see if you could access piefed using Voyager for Lemmy as a front end. It’s about the only decent app for Lemmy that doesn’t squash things on my iPhone mini with text zoom enabled