My ratings:

Communities - 5/5 (tons are local, most others are federated)
Culture - 4/5 (nothing is perfect)
Moderation - 5/5 (seems reasonable, stays out of the way most of the time)
Availability - 5/5 (no issues for one year, beyond quick updates and such)
Performance - 5/5 (hosted in New Zealand but works well for me)
Federation - 5/5 (just a handful of servers are not federated and the list is public, can be reviewed)

Their home page tagline:

Federated, open‑source, ad‑free, and fully under your control. Build or join a community that reflects your values with no corporate overlords.

I moved to my piefed.social account last year when the lemm.ee instance I'd been on for 2 years prior shut down. Piefed, the lemmy-compatible software has lots of additional quality of life features, so that's great, and piedfed.social's admins stay mostly out of the way and just let us converse. There are about 700 daily users, from what they self-report and that to me is plenty of people to always find someone to chat with.

I mod a few communities on here, including !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social , !raygungothic@piefed.social and !artporn@piefed.social.

I'd love to hear what others, both on and off piefed.social think of this instance.

Cheers,

I've been using this instance for years now and I find Rimu and Snoopy amazing - extremely responsive, quick to address bugs, while also adding new features, very active within the Threadiverse community, etc.

Also, the About page says:

It is home to 6708 users (of which 1551 were active in the last month). In 300 communities we discussed content from 73602 websites and made 56902 posts.

This activity level is confirmed also here, which if this were a Lemmy instance would make it the #5 one (see here). And then fedinsfw.app is ~2.5-fold larger still, so PieFed based instances have gone from being niche to a major chunk of the Threadiverse. Also, I guess this makes PieFed.social the #6 most-active instance across the entire Threadiverse (the largest Mbin instance has <0.5k active users, and while technically nodeBB is reported to be much larger, I don't see content from those instances, so I guess they aren't as totally compatible with Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin?).

That said, PieFed is undergoing a number of extremely controversial changes that make it quite... "opinionated", so new accounts and people making new communities should make sure that their vision aligns with that of the instance admins before migration. For one thing, a quota has been implemented that limits how often each person is allowed to vote each day (it does not matter up or down, or emoji too iirc) - including people on Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - with little to no discoverability about this fact (e.g. unlike other features a community description will not say what that vote quota is, for the particular instance a community is on).

Not every or even most PieFed instances use this quota - although it is enabled by default, it is also opt-out so admins can disable it if they want - so e.g. PieFed.zip has disabled it, and the PyLova fork of PieFed (used by e.g. quokk.au) has even removed it from the code. Though again, there is no standard way to see whether or not a particular admin has done this - and even if you find a message post saying one thing, the setting could change later on; nor are there any messages or visual indicators, preemptive or after-the-fact, as to why your votes suddenly cease to be accepted by this instance - your content is effectively shadow-censored. This one is VERY controversial, and some major people (including PugJesus) have left the Threadiverse as a result of it. Hopefully it either gets rolled back or at least discoverability is improved, as PieFed is now quite a major player in the Threadiverse.

Another anti-feature is that PieFed.social explicitly considers "memes" and "shitposting" to be a vastly inferior form of contribution. And image hosting really does incur monetary costs... so PieFed.social deletes images after some time, I believe it is one year. I forget the details here, like if it is an instance-level setting, or perhaps can be overridden by community mods, etc. Here too discoverability can be improved since some people have been quite incensed to discover that their content was deleted and they indicated that they were unaware that such would be the case (not all 3rd-party apps make reading the community sidebar or instance rules readily available).

PieFed.social also has a controversial "reputation" feature - which personally I love, at least in theory, bc it does not limit and instead merely labels someone to alert the recipient of what they could easily discover by a quick glance at someone's profile anyway, e.g. if you receive 10x more downvotes than upvotes routinely... that is good for someone to know, when they might otherwise respond and then not realize what they are getting themselves into by doing so!!! However, the implementation of the Reputation feature has been criticized, e.g. if you enjoy "reaction" memes, and enjoy responding with just one of those - like I'll put one of my favs below - as the sole contribution of your comment, then it will lower your Reputation score.

Another aspect is that few of these features were announced with much or any advanced notice - the controversial daily vote quota feature was quite buried and multiple instance owners indicated surprise at how their machines were behaving after updating the sourcecode, and asking how to turn it off.

Anyway, for purely plain-text posts, of serious content matter, PieFed.social can be a great home. It is improving its integration with Mastodon and already has the enormous slew of features that PieFed is quite famous for. Also, PieFed provides a number of tools to help instance admins and mods to detect and either label or altogether remove LLM spam, which I find to be fantastic! 😍 Multiple labeling options are made available including displaying the letters "AI" next to a post or showing it as semi-transparent (or hide it altogether, or simply do nothing at all in this regard). This aspect is one of the primary selling points for this instance, and is directly featured in its tagline at the PieFed instance chooser:

An instance run by the founder of PieFed. A troll-free, AI-free, bot-free space.

However, for enjoyers of meme and shitposting content including posts, comments, and people who like to be friendly and vote a lot (to encourage community growth by making contributors feel welcomed rather than like they are posting to an empty room?), you are invited to go elsewhere - except again, the discoverability of this fact is super poor, especially as the tagline even says:

Explore Anything, Discuss Everything.

Which while technically true, not all content is equally valued - e.g. won't lower your reputation for posting it and getting deleted after a year.

So I said invited to go elsewhere - where would that be? PieFed.zip is very welcoming, with a very capable admin team that is the same as their Lemmy.zip version, or an instance running the PyLova fork has removed such anti-features from the codebase (although admittedly not fully necessary btw bc with the exception of the daily vote quota that shadow-censors contributions, the other controversial aspects are all opt-in rather than opt-out anyway).

PieFed.social can be like a dream - if you love serious conversations and hate unlabeled LLM spam. Just make sure that you know what you are signing up for, so that you aren't disappointed later on.

Wow, great, fair comment. Thanks for filling in the gaps I left.

PieFed.social deletes images after some time, I believe it is one year. I forget the details here, like if it is an instance-level setting, or perhaps can be overridden by community mods, etc.

Yes. 1 year. I've seen that happen in my art community. I understand why they do that.

Yes and it does make perfect sense just... people should be told. As a mod, were you able to tweak that setting - like could you make it shorter? Longer? Disable altogether?

Also, I took a look at a couple of them, like !artporn@piefed.social, and I see no words of any kind in the community sidebar that would indicate removal after one year. Especially if this is an instance-level setting over which a mod has zero control over anyway, then this text really should have been added automatically to the community sidebar, imho - and all the more so when others post to the community from other instances and so may have no idea how PieFed ones (those that have this setting enabled - although again, how are people supposed to know which ones have vs. have not? Afaict there is zero ability to discover this).

Otherwise, PieFed risks alienating people who find out the hard way and then nope out to Lemmy or PyLova and complain bitterly about PieFed in the process. This kind of insensitivity does not bode well for the future of the PieFed software. Then again, it's freely offered as FOSS, so as long as people know what they are getting into, it can be a great experience. Though like Lemmy, it's a great experience for an instance admin who has total control over their machine, a bit less so for mods who still have many settings available to be tweaked, and quite a lot less so for end-users who aren't even told what those settings are so that they can make informed decisions about which instances or communities to support with their efforts and attention.

Sorry - we were discussing the instance PieFed.social, but it seems impossible to not dip into issues with respect to the platform it runs, especially seeing as it is the flagship instance for that.