I'm a lemmy.zip user and I moderate two communities. One of them is new and another has about 350 subscribers. A recent issue related to .zip weighs too heavily on me to be able to stay on the instance.

I've had PieFed on my radar for a while now, as evidenced by the registration date of this account, but because moving community subscribers is hard and requires regular reminders, I postponed their migration. To this end, it's worth noting that PieFed currently allows to pull some old posts if you migrate, making it superior to Lemmy for moving a community.

Being fresh off of what I'm convinced are instances of brigading of my community, I also appreciate Rimu's focus on voting and activity patterns, as well as what looks like attempts to offer mod tools that aid with those and other tasks.

So the PieFed software feels like an obvious choice. What I'm struggling with is picking an instance. Aside from fedinsfw, .social is the only instance that has enough monthly active users, 1,500, to compete with some of the bigger Lemmy instances. Excluding these two, the others get around 300 monthly at best. The latest version of PieFed, 1.8, is from a month ago, but many are running on outdated versions. This is a problem because I like PieFed's active pace of development. Even my own bug report and a wording suggestion from just recently were quickly addressed. Outdated versions wouldn't be able to make use of these improvements.

Going instance by instance, here's my thought process:

• Looking at the numbers, piefed.social is the way to go. However, given that my previous two instances involved serious disagreements with the staff, I don't want to run into a situation where I'm at odds with Rimu, as it could also close the door to my contributions to PieFed as a whole, either by my choice or by Rimu's.

• piefed.zip and piefed.world are not acceptable, as I've already been through those.

• piefed.ca is the next best based on its number of users, but it's on PieFed 1.7 and I haven't been able to reach the admins over the past two days. One criterion I'm looking for after being brigaded is being able to urgently get in touch with an admin, so responsiveness matters.

• feddit.online is up to date, but I can't quite understand it. It's positioned as being separate from .social, but its main admin is a generic name, there are two main admins from .social, and one other admin with zero public activity.

• piefed.blahaj.zone runs on an older version of PieFed. One moderator of a flagship community on lemmy.blahaj.zone also moderates a community with a long history of brigading and harassment, so I'm not sure it's a great choice.

And that's it for the instances with at least 100 monthly users. Given that everything is federated, you'd think the per-instance user counts don't matter, but my limited understanding of how federation works is that posts may not even be pulled if there aren't enough users subscribing to the communities they originate from. Moreover, if an instance is not attracting enough users, I feel it is more likely to be closed down.

I could go over some of the others, but there's some seemingly petty drama involving the next on the list, so it may be best not to.

Edit: Corrected one fact about feddit.online.