I’ve been considering making the move to Piefed for a while, but I suppose there are a few things that I haven’t been able to find that I was wondering about.
First, what is Piefed.social’s structural situation like? After having survived the fall of Kbin (big RIP) and seen Lemm.ee fall because of admins who cannot continue for completely understandable and unavoidable personal reasons, what is Piefed’s situation there? I don’t see the list of admins on the sidebar like in Lemmy instances, do you have enough admins to weather growth? Is there a broader org you could theoretically cooperate with if there was a sudden need for admins?
Second, what is Piefed’s financial situation like? I’ve seen plenty of sites, though so far no major Fediverse instances, fall because of an inability to keep donations and expenses in order. I see the donation page, but what is the financial health of the instance like? Some instances post monthly or yearly reviews of the financial situation, but if Piefed does, I don’t know where to find it.
Third, what is Piefed’s position on genocide? I fucking hate that I have to ask this, but having seen too many people on the Fediverse deny the Holodomor, Uyghur genocide, etc, including the Lemmy devs themselves (who are no small part of the reason why I’m considering making the move), I don’t want to move here and then find out that the position of the admins is something horrific. I don’t expect that the admins intend to play whack-a-mole with genocide deniers themselves, since if anything that’s properly the job of moderators and communities to drive the bastards out, but simply knowing that the admins are not supporters of genocide denial would put my mind at ease a great deal.
Fourth, what is the defederation policy of Piefed.social?
Thank you for your time!
Others are responding to each question here so I’ll just add this one thought: to be clear PieFed is software, like Lemmy, so some of these considerations would go more at the instance level.
Perhaps it would help to compare it to Mbin, the other major Lemmy alternative:
Mbin has about 700 MAUs (Monthly Active Users), ~3/4ths all on one instance fedia.io and another 1/5th on Kbin.earth. That’s fairly centralized, although then again Lemmy itself until semi-recently had Lemmy.world representing 4/5ths of the userbase, before a major campaign helped distribute things. Now iirc it’s still about 40% of the actually active userbase, which gets complicated by people having alt accounts, especially true during times of upheaval such as someone having both a Lemm.ee account and also their new one, both of which were used in the same month (I personally have 3 accounts, or 4 if you count the deprecated Kbin, 2 that I regularly check in monthly, bc often instances can be unreachable for a day or so, so as I migrate from one to another I simply don’t delete the old to use as a backup).
PieFed has about 1500 MAUs - most of these are recent additions so perhaps it’s still too much in flux to say much about what may remain true in the future, but for now it’s extremely promising that PieFed.social only makes up 3/5ths of these. PieFed.blahaj.zone, PieFed.ca, feddit.online, and PieFed.zip each make up another 5-10% of the total userbase.
And all of this is tiny in comparison to Lemmy, e.g. lemmy.world alone has 15 thousand MAUs, so an order of magnitude larger than all of PieFed instances combined. So if and when they switch to PieFed… it will be a large shift in the balance of users, immediately putting PieFed and Lemmy on roughly equal footing in terms of MAUs. And then other Lemmy instances may follow, or perhaps precede that like the aforementioned blahaj and others.