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!
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.
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!