It seems that a lot of new people have learned about these platforms from a popular post on Reddit. We currently see 78 notifications (and counting) and a pile of applications on piefed.ca
I am pinning this thread on both platforms for new users to pop in to and ask questions. Please give them a warm welcome!
edit: 392 new users on the first day and hundreds more since then, all from one post π₯³
Please let us know how we can help! For example, here are some tips on finding communities: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities The guide says Lemmy, but the steps are the same on Piefed
Since a lot of people arrived here from r/BuyCanadian, maybe you will be interested in !buycanadian@lemmy.ca
π Finding Canadian Communities on Piefed
- Open a topic from this list: https://piefed.ca/topics
- Browse that entire topic, or subscribe to individual communities from the sidebar
piefed.ca hasn't had any outages since this morning, what were you seeing?
You only need to sign up for one instance, they all see each others content. Think of it more like email - you wouldn't sign up for both gmail.com and hotmail.com
For example these two both show the same community which is hosted over at lemmy.world:
https://lemmy.ca/c/technology@lemmy.world vs https://piefed.ca/c/technology@lemmy.world
Lemmy.ca and piefed.ca are both run by us (fedecan) and are just different software platforms to interact with the fediverse. Lemmy was the first big popular one and is written in Rust, but Piefed came along more recently and is written in Python (hence the Pie in it's name). Piefed has been quicker about adding features, and many people have issues with the politics of the Lemmy developers. Ultimately they both let you interact with all the same communities and posts.
Otter put a nice doc together at https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started which has some pictures that might help you understand it all. It can be a little confusing at first!
You can use either, they're both under active development and we maintain both instances. Many people prefer piefed, I personally have stuck with Lemmy. Lemmy makes up much more of our user base still compared to Piefed.
I personally use Thunder on android and I quite like it, but I don't know what's popular in the ios world. It looks like it's available for IOS too, but I can't speak to the quality of it on there - https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/thunder-for-lemmy/id6450518497
I left reddit during the first big API debacle exodus and joined lemmy.ca, around that time Smorks was tired of running the site all himself so I offered my help. Otter and MP3 joined shortly after to help administer everything.
As we took things over I wasn't comfortable taking donations without a proper non-profit in place, hence Fedecan was born. Big thanks to otter for putting in most of the work around it. We used to be hosted on OVH but after a big outage I donated some beefy server grade hardware to run us on, and we're in a datacenter in Vancouver now.
Monthly bills (hosting, domain reg, non-profit related stuff) are fully paid for by donations. We have no other funding and no affiliations to any other groups. We don't take any payment for running this, all our time is volunteered.
https://lemmy.ca/post/47466646 is a bit old now but has some more data about our donations / sites / infrastructure. There's several links at the top to more details as well. We're due for another big status update post but it might take me a bit to get to.
Realistically it would probably just shut down, but our donations are more than covering our expenses at the moment and the site is still growing. I don't have any concerns about not being able to pay the bills. The site only costs us about $200/mo to run so it's not a huge amount, but I'll admit it's only that low due to my donating a server worth around $40k (when it was new, although it'd be like $80k today thanks to ram prices).
Honestly, that sounds like a lot of work π I'm not keen on spending time writing up business growth docs and having meetings, my day job has enough of that for me. If someone else comes along and wants to join the org + help drive that then we'd probably be open to it, but we've all got busy lives and it's not a priority for us.
Nope. It's something we've discussed, but for now we're all on board with keeping things lightweight and not trying to turn this into wikipedia with regular fund raisers to pay salaries.