I have been mostly out of the loop with the development around PieFed (and I would like to be in the loop). So can you give a few examples which showcase their speed of development?

I went through the project’s commit log and the only observation I could make is that many of their commits seem typical of a project in their nascent stages.

My own method was to join a PieFed instance (although just visiting one without an account can yield some partial data) and watch how many things change on a weekly basis.

The number of times that I saw the transition from "feature X does not exist" to "feature X now exists, or was tweaked to be improved" has been too damn high meme just perfection.

(The latter is anecdotal, as I have not looked myself but hear it often from others who have)