So since I am now quite happy with the planets, the question is what is or if there is a demand for a Fediverse systems with individual accounts. I was honestly not happy with the amount of spam accounts and random channel clones on the Hubzilla instance previously and are also looking for a simple to run and low maintenance system. I am also looking at it mainly from the perspective of personal use-case, but I am happy to open it up to other community members here.
Pixelfed seems like a cool option because of the creative commons image sharing (and maybe up-coming live-streaming) feature, but it seems not very stable yet and the hosting infrastructure is somewhat maintenance heavy.
So while I think Pixelfed remains a viable idea, I think from a personal use-case point of view I would prefer Epicyon. It basically just needs a nicer theme, feature wise it looks very nice and they are also interested in supporting Lemmy community federation. But it is intentionally designed for small communities, so probably I will have to close registrations once there are more then 20 or so concurrent users. So right now I doubt that would be a problem, but it might become one in the future.
Edit: on some further though... I guess I will retire the social. domain and host Epicyon elsewhere just as a private instance. It really doesn't scale and right now I don't really want to deal with maintaining another service for FGD. Let me rather focus on improving the forum, the new planets and of course the chat server. I hope you all agree.