It seems that a lot of new people have learned about these platforms from a popular post on Reddit. We currently see 78 notifications (and counting) and a pile of applications on piefed.ca too many registration applications for me to keep this up to date.
I am pinning this thread on both platforms for new users to pop in to and ask questions. Please give them a warm welcome!
Please let us know how we can help! For example, here are some tips on finding communities: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities The guide says Lemmy, but the steps are the same on Piefed
Since a lot of people arrived here from r/BuyCanadian, maybe you will be interested in !buycanadian@lemmy.ca
🍁 Finding Canadian Communities on Piefed
- Open a topic from this list: https://piefed.ca/topics
- Browse that entire topic, or subscribe to individual communities from the sidebar
edit: 392 new users on the first day and hundreds more since then, all from one post 🥳

piefed.ca hasn’t had any outages since this morning, what were you seeing?
You only need to sign up for one instance, they all see each others content. Think of it more like email - you wouldn’t sign up for both gmail.com and hotmail.com
For example these two both show the same community which is hosted over at lemmy.world:
https://lemmy.ca/c/technology@lemmy.world vs https://piefed.ca/c/technology@lemmy.world
Lemmy.ca and piefed.ca are both run by us (fedecan) and are just different software platforms to interact with the fediverse. Lemmy was the first big popular one and is written in Rust, but Piefed came along more recently and is written in Python (hence the Pie in it’s name). Piefed has been quicker about adding features, and many people have issues with the politics of the Lemmy developers. Ultimately they both let you interact with all the same communities and posts.
Otter put a nice doc together at https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started which has some pictures that might help you understand it all. It can be a little confusing at first!