i used to call the micrblog stuff the ‘twitterverse’… and i kind of still want to. I may edit my mbin instance to use that term, and i also hate ‘magazine’ in favor of ‘Subs’ or ‘Community’
to me all of these server products are federating media servers with varying access to those 2 pieces. the underlying software should be nearly irrelevant except for them.
the ‘community/magazine’ is the source of the data and ‘remote’ servers cache that data. when i post to tenforward im posting to the source@itshomeinstance and my server receives a copy… a locally cached version.
my server still has a ton of kbin.social content for example despite that server being doa.
i refer to my instance, at the moment, as primarily an ‘onramp’ server. my users utilize it to access remote content almost exclusively as you point out piefed does. But, my server also caches a huge amount of fediverse data… both from all the lemmys and major microblog platforms mastodon, threads, and universodeon among others.
the specific platform lemmy.world utilizes should have no impact on me or my users if they do things correctly.
ive never lived in a house or apt without one. they seem ubiquitous to me. seems weird there wouldnt be one.