Actually I think it predated a good amount of that. Iirc PyLova was started much earlier than most people realize, stemming out of a frustration from wanting to contribute to the project but then Mia’s contributions were reportedly taken by the main PieFed dev without seemingly proper acknowledgement. And then yes the PieFed drama caused additional attention to be paid to PyLova than previously (particularly in the earlier stages of the fork - surely that’s a huge learning curve).

PyLova hasn’t done a whole awful lot yet in some respects, but especially some of the more recent inclusions may be absolute game-changers moving forward, especially the ability to support user shareable blocklists. That should go a long way towards retaining people coming here from Reddit who would otherwise flee this toxic shithole (well, some major parts of the Threadiverse are that way at least - certain highly notable politics communities in particular spring to mind, though after blocking this place can become much more chill! even if noticeably quieter…:-P). And PyLova un-does a lot of the minor annoyances that the main PieFed dev did not feel fit into his vision - e.g. a user can choose to display both upvotes and downvotes side by side, just like in Lemmy.

Meanwhile, PieFed is off chasing better compatibility with Mastodon. Some people want that, so it is a laudable goal, but then PyLova is focusing on improving the existing experience here within the Threadiverse, which also seems laudable to me?

However it got started, it is contributing to improving things, as software forks often do - that ability is part of what makes FLOSS so great!!