I have photos/short videos of painted miniatures which I want to show to interested hobby communities. I have started a pixelfed.social account as I have heard this is Fediverse’s equivalent of Instagram. Whether it is or not is irrelevant - I quite like the interface, so I decided to keep my content there.

Now pixelfed.social is a generic instance, there are miniatures-interested people but apparently not too many, so I don’t really have much traffic on my profile. Not to worry, I found relevant communities: A specific warhammer Pixelfed instance, a tabletop gaming instance of Mastodon and two or three Lemmy communities scattered across the instances. There is also noticeable activity under warhammer-adjacent hashtags on the largest mastodon instances.

I would like to show my work to all those people. How do I do it most efficiently and most “fediverse-ly”? On Reddit I could post to a miniature painting subreddit and then cross-post to other subreddits. On facebook I’d start a fanpage for my painting and share this way across groups or set up a public folder on my profile and link to it. What’s the fedi equivalent?

  • ShittyKopper [they/them]English
    2•1 year ago

    Thanks! I just tried testing the @-ing a Lemmy community, Pixelfed treated it as if I tried to find an user and said “no match found”.

    Hm, it would try to find a user, because communities are internally “users” that boost all the posts/comments they receive. ActivityPub isn’t as interoperable as it ideally would be, with all the hasty extensions, quirks of particular implementations, and with Lemmy being comparatively new it may make sense for you to open up an issue on the PixelFed GitHub, maybe they’ll look into it for you.

    I know that people have been able to do the @ thing from Mastodon. So it may be some incompatibility between PF and Lemmy. The people who actually implemented them would know the details on why it’s not working.

    I have chosen a mainstream instance as I believe it’s less likely to be shut down due to e.g. its admin not being able or willing to pay for the server - so for stability. Do you think it’s a wrong way of thinking?

    The bigger a server the costlier it is to run. That’s true with every service. Most admins rely on donations on top of paying out of pocket, so as long as the small instance you’re on is tight knit enough that the few people there will occasionally chip in, shutting down won’t be too much of a concern.

    But when I want to share something widely having an account on a big one seems reasonable?

    As long as even 1 person from “a big one” follows you, your posts end up there, will be indexed by hashtags or what have you. So start following people and get followed back and eventually discoverability will sorta happen.

    If there is a warhammer specific a.gup.pe group, consider @ing that as well, since the way it works (boosting all the content it receives to all it’s followers) it will have the same effect.

    • @jantinOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Hm, it would try to find a user, because communities are internally “users” that boost all the posts/comments they receive. ActivityPub isn’t as interoperable as it ideally would be, with all the hasty extensions, quirks of particular implementations, and with Lemmy being comparatively new it may make sense for you to open up an issue on the PixelFed GitHub, maybe they’ll look into it for you.

      OK so this is why I saw it as an user, for a while I was worried I have created a Pixelfed account for the community hehe. I was surprised to find nothing about these things on the Internet, so maybe indeed I should reach out to devs.

      The bigger a server the costlier it is to run. That’s true with every service. Most admins rely on donations on top of paying out of pocket, so as long as the small instance you’re on is tight knit enough that the few people there will occasionally chip in, shutting down won’t be too much of a concern.

      Food for thought! This is a reasonable argument, I’ll need to reconsider and learn how to migrate things between instances. But I leave this for later, one functionality at a time.