PieFed on Ubuntu 24.04

Why the cloudimg image

PieFed creates its administrator only through an interactive setup prompt, so an image that skipped that step would ship with no owner at all, and one that answered it at build time would ship the same password to every buyer. The cloudimg image creates the administrator during first boot with a password unique to that instance, and does it before anything will accept a connection, so there is no window in which the site is reachable without an owner. The Flask signing key that protects every session cookie is generated per instance too, along with the database and cache passwords, because a shared signing key would let anyone forge a session on every instance built from the same image. Registration ships closed and the instance ships private. The database, the cache and the application server all listen on loopback only, with a single reverse proxy as the way in, and community data, uploaded media and database storage sit on a dedicated data volume rather than the system disk. Federation needs a public name and TLS, which no image can bake in, so the paired deploy guide covers that step honestly. Backed by 24/7 cloudimg support.