Hey, all good questions.

Different hardware, piefed.zip is running on a cloud vps. Still with hetzner so the admin team can access & troubleshoot.

Donations wise, if piefed takes off we’ll probably go down a joint .zip dono route, rather than distinctly donating to each individual server. If nothing else, its easier to manage one dono page/setup than multiple. In the meantime I’ll fund at least month 1 until I’m happy either way. Lemmy.zip is still my baby and won’t be going anywhere. But yes I’ll do some comms around that when I’m happy with a solution.

Piefed offers more in terms of moderation and enables a wider “staff” team, which is a level that lemmy is missing, I.e. an instance moderator. We’ve already started to leverage that, so that the moderation isn’t just on the admin team, rather trusted community members can help out. Happy for anyone to reach out if they’re planning on switching to piefed and want to help out.