Just checked. Still works.

That’s not what happened. It wasn’t any more or less toxic than any other place on the internet, the lead admin just got burnt out. He asked the community for volunteers to moderate the instance and apparently nobody showed up.

So he’s shutting down the instance next month. It wasn’t dysfunctional or toxic, he just sacrificed a lot and AFAIK never even broke even with server costs.

The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.

The co-founder is definitely referring to the Gwent standalone game. I played it when open beta came out but it steadily went downhill from there until they eventually stopped working on it in 2023.

The battery life test is even more damning. SteamOS in some cases had more than 2x better battery life.

My biggest issue with Piefed is how much space the UI uses. Last I checked it didn’t have a “compact mode” like current Lemmy or Alexandrite. Browsing communities is also a bit awkward since it shows you so many topics without a way to sort or remove them.