ok, need some feedback: It appear that pixelfed is moving in the direction of mariadb, away from postgres, and the current issues appear to stem from my us of postgres. I've been contemplating a move to the domain infosec.pics, which would essentially be starting over. There is no (as far as I know) working way to migrate pixelfed accounts from one server to a different server. I don't like the idea, but I also don't like the idea of a persistently partially broken instance, either.
We have 323 total accounts and 26 active accounts, so while the blast radius may be small, it's a complete PITA for those 26 people.