With the help of other users here I have finally been able to get a PieFed instance up and running! I am running 1.5.3 (Docker install) and I've run into one small problem...trying to manually purge deleted posts always redirects to a page indicating that an error has occurred, the post is not purged. I am not sure how I would go about debugging this, but I will certainly provide any additional information that one might need. I appreciate all the help, the best part about the fediverse for me has to be the community! 👍

Edit: included screenshot of error page.