

IMO Lemmy/PieFed is safer to run because the community mods will delete anything illegal, which will delete it for you, too. About 5 instances host 95% of communities worth joining so it’s easy for us to coordinate defense.
Mastodon is thousands of instances and more wild west. Bad stuff can come from anywhere.








I’m a flask developer but even so I would use PHP for this. There are a million php-based contact form scripts on the web and configuring caddy to use PHP will be easier than python/flask.
As for the sending email part - don’t run a smtp server locally, too much hassle. Smtp2go has a free tier which will be fine.