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 too many registration applications for me to keep this up to date.

I am pinning this thread on both platforms for new users to pop in to and ask questions. Please give them a warm welcome!

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 [email protected]

🍁 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

edit: 392 new users on the first day and hundreds more since then, all from one post 🥳

  • Shadow@lemmy.caMEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    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

    • stinkytofuisgood@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      Thanks, I will check out Thunder as well. Seems like no data collection. It’s not the top app by ratings but in my experience the real gems are often hidden below the surface.

      I have another question, and feel free to redirect me elsewhere if this has been asked many times; what is the goal of Fedecan? Its funding? Its affiliations, if any?

      • Shadow@lemmy.caMEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        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. 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.

        • stinkytofuisgood@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          Thanks for all that. I’ll check out that link. Lots to look at overall.

          If Fedecan funding ever ceases to pay the bills, is there a plan in place, or does it shut down?

          May I suggest looking at government grants and funding if they don’t interfere with your goal and operations, especially now, the government is looking to boost Canadian enterprise. I want to keep my professional life separate from this account, but I’ll just say that it’s worth looking into and the resources for doing so have been quite streamlined compared to what most think of when they envision a Canadian government website and/or bureaucracy.

          Finally, since you’re a registered nonprofit I know this is technically available with a search, but do those working with Fedecan pay themselves for their work? To any others reading, please don’t get the wrong idea - nonprofits and businesses have diverse needs and it’s just a question. I’m curious to learn, no ill intent - actually, I hope that’s a notable difference from Reddit that people (including myself) will grow to appreciate.

          • Shadow@lemmy.caMEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            If Fedecan funding ever ceases to pay the bills, is there a plan in place, or does it shut down?

            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 $20k.

            May I suggest looking at government grants and funding if they don’t interfere with your goal and operations, especially now, the government is looking to boost Canadian enterprise.

            Honestly, that sounds like a lot of work 😂 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.

            do those working with Fedecan pay themselves for their work?

            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.

            • stinkytofuisgood@lemmy.caEnglish
              0·
              15 days ago

              Thanks for the details, I appreciate it! I’m going to send you a private message. Mentioning it here for clarity.

              Keep up the good work! I’m happy to see something like this taking off, and hope the momentum grows!