

It will show up automatically if you meet some conditions (which you won’t until 1.2 is deployed):
- Running version 1.2 that has the code for the instance chooser (or maybe a custom build like piefed.fan must be)
- Enable the instance chooser in the admin settings
I don’t know all the details as this is something rimu coded up, but I suspect that your instance would then be listed as a choice for any other piefed instances that have the instance chooser enabled and that you are federated with.
Piefed doesn’t currently natively support setting up an rss feed to populate a community (though there is an issue for it on the codeberg, so hopefully soon). However, we do have an api at this point that is feature complete enough to cook something like this up without too much trouble.
As for self-hosting piefed, it is pretty comparable to lemmy. They both are dockerized and I have a personal instance of both of them. Resource-wise, for a personal instance, I haven’t really noticed a difference, though my VMs are well enough provisioned that I doubt I would run into any bottlenecks for a 1-user instance.
This is basically how I have ended up becoming a piefed contributor. There were features that weren’t in lemmy that I was frustrated by, but don’t know a thing about rust. So, I just started implementing things in python…and have just kept doing it.