Hi all,

Many of you may be aware of the "old" front ends from some lemmy instances that replicates reddit's old style. I've translated it over to Piefed, at old.piefed.zip.

It's very much in beta, so if you do use it please let me know of any issues or bugs.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hello all,

Server has been upgraded - there will probably be fluctuations in performance as things catch back up, and I'll also be tweaking database performance, so there may be brief periods where there are disconnects.

Thanks for you patience :)

Demigodrick

---

Original message:

Hello all,

I'm going to boost the performance of the server so I am prewarning you all that there is likely to be some downtime between 20:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC while we perform the upgrade.

Its only an incremental server performance upgrade, but should allow things to feel a bit snappier.

Thanks
Demigodrick

Hello!

Welcome to Piefed.zip's August update for 2025!

As Piefed is still relatively new to us (and admittedly currently underutilised by us) I'm going to be talking a lot about what I plan to do.

However, we'll start with what we've done so far.

Firstly, all the legal policies are in place. I've updated the About page with links to all of the policies, including Ts & Cs, privacy, and code of conduct. This is particularly important, and I will talk more about this in September with joint messaging across all of our platforms, but Piefed.zip is now technically owned by DotZip Ltd, a non-profit entity (owned by me) designed to properly and transparently run our sites.

This doesn't mean much day to day, but it does mean I've enshrined that all donations must be spent on running the platforms by law . So hopefully that's a positive thing.

---

Server updates

Right, so what we're looking to do going forwards!

We're working on "completing" ZippyBot for Lemmy, and once that is in place, we'll port it over to Piefed using the API (which is still in development). This will give community mods the same (if not more) ability to manage their communities via the web interface. Piefed is already REALLY GOOD at providing lots of options, so Zippy won't need to be as complex as it is on Lemmy.

We added the Blorp frontend - blorp.piefed.zip

We're working on a custom theme. It will be yellowish.

I'm trying to keep Piefed.zip relatively up to date too. The updates are very different to Lemmy, in that they're pushed out much more frequently (we're following the dev builds rather than waiting for bigger updates, so you get the features faster).

Also on the lookout for a custom logo now too - if you fancy trying to make one, let me know ;)

---

Graphs!

Really the only reason people read these!

CPU
I have two graphs for you!
Cpu over 7 days

CPU over 30 days

RAM over 7 days:

Network traffic over 30 days:
a

Cloudflare overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Unique visitors:

---

Donations

If you use Piefed.zip a lot, and fancy helping us to keep it running, we'd appreciate a small donation.

For now, we're collecting all donations under our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency.

Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.

Moderator recruitment

We'd love to recruit a moderator or two. You'll help us to check reports, but also build communities and correctly tag them, so new users can onboard easier. If you fancy helping out, please drop me a pm here, on lemmy, or an email to hello@piefed.zip.

---

All that's left for me to say is thank you for being here!

Please feel free to reach out to me at any time if you have any questions, and I hope to see you all around the fediverse soon!

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi all,

A new front end has popped up! Blorp is a desktop and mobile UI you can try out right now!

Blorp even has a Lemmy community - !blorp@lemmy.ml, if you try it out I'm sure the dev would love some feedback :)

You can access it via blorp.piefed.zip (and, if you're reading this on Lemmy.zip, you can access it via blorp.lemmy.zip!).

Hope everyone enjoys their weekend! :)

Demigodrick

Hi All,

Just like Lemmy, I'll be trying to do a monthly server update to go over what we're doing with Piefed and how its all going.

As it stands, Piefed is in very active development with much more frequent smaller releases, and so we are more frequently updating the site to make sure we get all the fixes and features in.

Because of this, you might get more frequent downtime, but this shouldn't last very long.

If you're wondering, we're using a hetzner VPS (same as we did when we started Lemmy.zip all that time ago!) to figure out what resource we need. Because of this, we can leverage Hetzner's very easy backup solution, which is a big positive.

We also have images stored in cloud buckets on backblaze just like lemmy, so this helps keep the storage on the actual server down.

Just like Lemmy, I'll be posting some graphs and charts and stuff. In case you're interested, both our Lemmy server and this server are connected over VPN so we can use the same backend tools in one place instead of duplicating them in two places. Makes it much easier to get all our info together! We're also running Piefed in docker.

So here's the graphs!

CPU:

RAM:

Image storage:

Cloudflare overview over the last 30 days:

---

So, that gives a brief overview of the server. Happy to take any questions. I'll try and do these on or around the 15th of each month, and keep the Lemmy.zip ones on or around the 1st of the month.

Thanks!

Demigodrick

Hello all,

Just a quick message to let you all know we are beavering away in the background to get things set up, as Piefed releases more features.

So you're aware, we now have a suite of legal documents in place:

Code of Conduct
Cookie Policy
Defederation Policy
Donation Policy
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service

You can see all of these on the about page at any time too.

We also have all of the backend stuff set up, including the hello@piefed.zip email address.

We hope you're enjoying Piefed.zip, please let us know if you need anything.

PS we'll be doing regular server updates, just like we do at lemmy.zip. Rather than the start of the month, we'll be posting these on or around the middle of the month!

Thanks,

Demigodrick

Welcome to Piefed.zip! 🥳🎉🎊

This instance is run by the same team as Lemmy.zip, with the same moderation and federation principles.

This is a general purpose instance for anyone.

Please bear with us as we get everything working and all our policies in place.

If you have any questions please let us know!