The problems with colonies are plentiful.
First, to sustain a population it will need a lot of infrastructure.
On top of having good medical facilities and personnel (the medical side of things would have to be better the harsher the environment is) a colony would need law enforcement, food production, service industry, construction industry and an educational system that could keep the education levels high enough to have a cream of specialists that would be able to run these specialist parts of the infrastructure.
On top of that you would need all kinds of industry just for the infrastructure upkeep.
Then you would need quite high population numbers to keep the workforce in the optimal age for working. Family, children, all the things those entail.
To have a truly self-sustaining colony in 0.0 would be extremely hard, especially with the fact that all the colonies in 0.0 are susceptible to attack 24/7/365.
So...
I would think that pretty much all the colonies in the great 0.0 are specialist colonies.
With imported workforce and with imported services and goods to sustain them.
The pirate factions would not be exempt of this, all of them need to leech off the major factions for their needs, be it workforce or the goods to sustain their own.
Yes, there probably is colonies with a low population and a low technology base that have been left behind in 0.0, but they will need centuries if not millenia to get anywhere technologically, if they even have the natural resources for it.