Some of this is expected. An instance only knows about the content that it pulled in, and so piefed.ca is missing a lot of stuff from before we spun it up. Similarly, it doesn't start pulling in content from a community until someone from here searches for it. We did a bit of that before we launched, but there are lots of communities that are still not fetched. You may have been the first one to try to access [email protected] :)
For example, we accessed the main [email protected] community a while back, and so both views are similar (and hopefully identical) by now:
Piefed.ca's feeds should continue to get better over time as more people use it. Lemmy also has a few tricks to improve this process, such as a third party tool that automatically broadcasts new communities so they can be pulled in. Something like that might become available or compatible with Piefed in the future.
It might also be possible to bulk import old posts into piefed, but I'm not sure if that's possible right now. We were able to do something similar with Pixelfed when we spun that up, but we relied on some built in functionality for it.
Thanks for tagging both accounts :)
I like the ideas here! One of the things that I tried to do when I did the sidebars on [email protected], was to keep it as short and simple as possible. I was hoping to increase the chance that someone reads enough of it to be encouraged to subscribe and post. Looking at that one again now, there are some things that I would change to make it even shorter and cleaner.
Long term, it would be nice to have a general help community for people to post questions in. That way, if someone is very lost, they can just post there and get some answers.
The part I'm not sure about is if we should close the other platform specific communities. A generic community is good for those who don't know where they should post, but it might discourage other people who want to stay subscribed to it. New people might get confused by posts that discuss features that don't apply to the platform they are using, and experienced users might not like seeing a bunch of posts about a platform they don't have experience with. PieFed's feeds might help in the later case, where experienced people can create or subscribe to a feed of a bunch of help communities. That way it's still easy to answer questions, regardless of where new users decide to post them.