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!

  • RimuEnglish
    20•2 days ago

    Good questions. Wouldn’t it be great if the instance-finder sites like join-lemmy or join.mastodon.org had filters for thoughtful stuff like that? I’m working on something along those lines ;-)

    Admins. PieFed instances list their admins on their ‘about’ page, so https://piefed.social/about . It shows 4 accounts there but two are me, one is inactive and afaik Andrew approves new registrations but mostly does coding? Anyway as this is the flagship instance so there are people, like cabbage, who have been here since the beginning, are pretty into PieFed and who I trust so it feels like help is available if needed. But TBH running this instance is very little time compared to how much I spend coding.

    Finances. Until a couple of weeks ago PieFed adoption was quite low and donations were embarrassingly tiny so I didn’t make a big thing about them. They’re still quite small - see https://www.patreon.com/c/PieFed and it’ll show you how much people donate. About 38 Euro? There’s a couple of bucks per month in Librepay too.

    That’s income. On the expenses side - PieFed is pretty efficient so the size of the server needed is low. I spend about 12 Euro per month for hosting. I can see that growing to 24 Euro soon-ish, as more mobile apps add PieFed support. At some point it could be necessary to close registrations which would be fine as there are other instances people can use and Lemmy has shown that the dev-run instance doesn’t need to be the biggest.

    The instance running costs are insignificant. The biggest expense for me is the time I spend coding PieFed when I should really be founding a startup or building an app with an actual business model or whatever. The dream is to one day get as much donations as a Lemmy dev so I can quit my real job and just do this. There’s no rush, I like my real job.

    Genocide - cabbage covered this well.

    Defederation - I really need to improve https://piefed.social/instances so it shows the blocked instances. Anything that is a continual moderation headache gets blocked, temporarily or otherwise. This week aaalll the spam is coming from lemmings.world so they’re out but once it dies down they’ll be back. Hexbear and lemmygrad will always be blocked and PieFed is coded to block them by default on all new instances (admins can change it). No plans to defederate lemmy.ml as I’ve built mod tools that help me find the most odious users & banned them and now it’s tolerable. lemy.lol is blocked because of it’s fascist logo. That’s about it.

    • cloudlessEnglish
      10•2 days ago

      Thank you for your effort in developing PieFed. I almost quit using the Fediverse because of Lemmy devs.

      I can finally use software free of tankie influences. And PieFed is so much better in usability and features.

      Your policies seem very reasonable.

      Wish you all the best!

    • freamonEnglish
      6•1 day ago

      afaik Andrew approves new registrations but mostly does coding?

      You originally added me so I could debug stuff based on the status incoming activities, which isn’t really relevant anymore.

      That isn’t my primary account atm, so I don’t really do any other admin stuff. That said, it might be an idea to keep some permissions in place for that account, so I can help out in case there’s a spam wave when it’s night time in NZ or something.

    • PugJesusOPEnglish
      6•2 days ago

      Fantastic on all accounts! I don’t have much, but regardless of whether I make the move, I’m going to see if I can scrounge up for a monthly donation in the near future!

    • SkavauEnglish
      1•2 days ago

      At some point it could be necessary to close registrations which would be fine as there are other instances people can use and Lemmy has shown that the dev-run instance doesn’t need to be the biggest.

      Is this something that you project could be required to implemented on a long-term basis? I ask this because new accounts (and this goes for anywhere) can sometimes just be instantly forgotten and abandoned, meaning that you would be in effect overseeing your own userbase tanking as older accounts just get forgotten but no-one can ‘replace’ them (in the sense of signing up).

      In my mind, some kind of automated clean-up system is ideal here but idk how that would work without accidently purging alt accounts with specific purposes.

      • RimuEnglish
        3•2 days ago

        I guess as the active userbase shrank naturally then server load and moderation load would decrease and registrations could be opened again, for a time.

        • SkavauEnglish
          1•2 days ago

          Well it wouldn’t shrink as such, people would just abandon their accounts - but they’d still be signed up.

          • RimuEnglish
            4•2 days ago

            Naah it’s ok. Inactive accounts might use a bit of space but that is not the thing that matters. The limits I expect to hit are federation traffic, it’s server load, it’s dealing with interpersonal issues. All those are caused by active accounts.

  • cabbageEnglish
    21•2 days ago

    Great questions - I’m curious as well. Would also be useful to know as I’d be happy to volunteer as a mod or up my donations if necessary.

    Regarding question 3, the answer is refreshingly clear. Here’s from the rules:

    PieFed is a place for thoughtful discussion, respectful debate, and factual engagement. We encourage diverse voices and aim to prevent content that harms, divides, or misleads. Accordingly the following types of content are prohibited on PieFed:

    […]

    3 - Authoritarian and Fascist Propaganda

    Content promoting fascist, ultranationalist, or authoritarian ideologies is not allowed, including things such as:

    • Genocide denial or minimization, such as denying or justifying atrocities in Gaza, Xinjiang, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
    • Use of fascist symbols & memes (e.g., Pepe the Frog), or 4chan/8chan screenshots.
    • Support for regimes or ideologies that suppress basic human rights including but not limited to Trumpism, Putin, Hamas, North Korea, Proud Boys.

    There’s also the Rational Discourse Toolkit in the side bar, which I think recognizes the role of social media as part of the problem and the challenge of trying to become part of the solution.

    As for defederation, there’s point 9 of the rules: “Generally this will be a last resort when problems from an instance are systemic or caused by the admins of the instance.”

    • PugJesusOPEnglish
      7•2 days ago

      Oh, fantastic! I didn’t catch that, I’m too used to things being in the sidebar, lmao. I have a lot of UI to unlearn/relearn

        • RimuEnglish
          8•2 days ago

          Good idea. I’ve put a link in the sidebar now but only on the home page.

          • PugJesusOPEnglish
            2•2 days ago

            With regards to rule 6 - what is the definition of sexually explicit content? For example, I recently posted, in .world, a 1st century AD artifact of a gladiator wind-chime fighting his own penis. Surely that is sexually explicit - is it banned? Similarly, on rare occasion I post risque memes with nudity or near-nudity and humorous sexual themes. Are those banned from Piefed.social?

            • RimuEnglish
              5•2 days ago

              Those examples are all fine.

              Anyway if you’re posting them on communities hosted on other instances it’s really up to them unless you post things that are illegal, in which case I’d need to step in.

              Piefed.social does not host NSFW-only communities like those on lemmynsfw. But community mods can make decisions about individual risque posts in their communities.

              • PugJesusOPEnglish
                4•2 days ago

                I meant the question as “What if I posted those examples on a Piefed.social comm”, but thank you for clarification!

  • OpenStarsEnglish
    5•1 day ago

    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.