After 5 months of chipping away at it, PieFed is now an installable 'app' in the Yunohost store! It's been there for a couple of weeks actually but until this weekend it had a scary red exclamation mark because some automated tests hadn't ran yet. But that's gone now so I feel confident about recommending it to others.
Yunohost is a linux distro for servers that has a web gui for installing and managing services, that takes all the hassle out of self-hosting. How to get started with Yunohost.
@squirrel@piefed.kobel.fyi and @michael@piefed.chrisco.me have had good success setting up their instances already: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1561141/thanks-to-rimu-ericgaspar-and-tituspijean-yunohost-has-a-working-piefed-setup