I’ve been considering launching a Lemmy server for a community lately, but am now back exploring piefed with the Lemm.ee shutdown.
I’ve read that Lemmy for some has been quite resource intensive and piefed was much easier on CPU and RAM. Is anyone able to share some metrics, say, for this server for reference?
It looks like documentation is better for piefed and the mod tools are better. I like the topics organization.
Downside is that the interstellar app didn’t seem to have that feature built in.
Also, my phone really does not like the word piefed lol.
But I’m starting to consider whether to trim a piefed instance instead of Lemmy. Is there anything I should know ahead of time? Such as unexpected gotchas or federation issues with Lemmy?
When piefed.social first launched in early 2024 it had 2 CPU cores. That was fine until people subscribed to hundreds of communities (more than a single-user instance would typically have) so after a few months I increased it to 4 cores (8 GB of RAM). That was plenty until this week when the number of users doubled (now 500+ MAU) so now there are 8 cores. This seems like way more than necessary so when the excitement dies down a shift back to 4 might be possible.
You really really need a CDN and it needs to be set up right. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/20/how-much-difference-does-a-cdn-make-to-a-fediverse-instance/
Also tune PostgreSQL - https://join.piefed.social/2025/03/19/tuning-postgresql-for-piefed/
that is very good to know, especially the tuning. Thank you!
I just published some Cloudflare caching settings - https://join.piefed.social/2025/06/06/optimal-cloudflare-caching-config-for-piefed/