Gup.pe groups were genuine ActivityPub Groups, like Lemmy communities, whereas these 'FediGroup' things are just Mastodon bots. They're a 'Service', aka the automated version of a 'Person', so they're no use to anyone on platforms (like Lemmy) that can only follow Groups.

The most similar recent thing to gup.pe is https://ovo.st/

Compare:

curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse | jq -r .type   
=> Group   
curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://ovo.st/club/askfedi | jq -r .type  
=> Group

with

curl --header 'accept: application/activity+json' https://fedigroups.social/@audiofiction | jq -r .type  
=> Service

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 days ago

Ah. That's disappointing. It does explain why it was running on a mastodon instance though.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Can't Piefed, et al. do everything a.gup.pe/FediGroups could do, and more?

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago

Yep, but to get those features you have to access it from the piefed/lemmy instance. gup.pe/friendica style groups predate lemmy though, and were designed to be accessed from your mastodon/fediverse account, rather than being signed in to directly.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 3 days ago

Yep.

FediGroups works with all the popular server types -- Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica

Weird exclusion of all threadiverse server types, there.