• mesamune
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    1 month ago

    Excellent. They are seeing huge growth. I’m hoping it’s sustainable, the main server is just getting slammed right now (according to the mastodon posts).

    According to fedidb all they need is 70k ish more people and I get will surpass Lemmy in number of users.

    • @cm0002
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      551 month ago

      Does Lemmy federate with pixelfed posts?

      • breakfastmtn
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        211 month ago

        They do. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Pixelfed supports groups yet so I don’t think you can interact in a meaningful way. I looked you up from pixelfed.social. I can see your account and could follow you but Pixelfed only shows posts with attached media so I can’t see any of your posts/comments.

        • @cm0002
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          81 month ago

          Yea I’ve been trying too, I can also search, see and “follow” comms and it’ll pull up things like the sidebar info, but actual content is missing

          So it’s there, but very broken unfortunately. I should make a note to open an issue if there’s not one already

        • @[email protected]
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          41 month ago

          Isn’t this the dilemma? Each type of fediverse project has its own focus, presenting posts in different ways. If we increase interoperability to the point where everything can be presented fully on any service, will each service be able to keep their focus? Would there be a point in having pixelfed when mastodon exists?

          • breakfastmtn
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            61 month ago

            I don’t think it should be a dilemma - but some do. I don’t see why there can’t be different corners of the Fediverse. This is my most isolated account here and I’m fine with that. I don’t personally want or need integration with Mastodon. I’m glad mbin has that for people who do but I’m not interested in it. And I think it’s kind of cool that there are different cultures within Fedi. Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Lemmy are all so different from each other and I don’t think it’s a problem to solve.

            I know the ActivityPub authors were concerned about Mastodon getting so big because it only implements a small portion of the AP spec. So they’re stoked that others are building out in ways that expand beyond the needs of microblogging.

          • @[email protected]
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            51 month ago

            Mastodon is an app for sharing text that can also share pictures and videos. Pixelfed is an app for sharing pictures and videos with limited text.

            You can curate a feed of pictures on Mastodon by following hashtags like #cats or #catstodon, but the interface is going to always emphasize the text first. Meanwhile on Pixelfed I can follow those same hashtags and get a much better experience for a feed primarily of pictures. Even though many/most of the posts will inevitably come from Mastodon users I can still browse those in my Pixelfed app in a much cleaner way. Artists can post their work from a Mastodon account, but the best way to view all their posts is going to be from Pixelfed.

            This is why interoperability is a good thing. The whole point of federation is that different apps can implement their own version of the spec to curate a different type of user experience.

      • mesamune
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        1 month ago

        Most servers do. Depends on their block/allow list and their setup.

        The software supports it, you just need to make sure one of your users has followed an account/lemmy community on the pixelfed side and make sure a lemmy account follows an account on the pixelfed side.

        Its not a perfect solution, but it gets the job done after that. (I tested this on an older version of lemmy and a new bleeding edge version of pixelfed)

        One of the biggest ongoing issues with lemmy is that all the other fediverse systems generally work together pretty well but then you get to lemmy and it works…kinda? Mostly? But there is always quirks, like only being able to post but not see comments. as I say on lemmy :). I like the platform because of the ongoing community that seems to stick around and have sustainable growth (like oooold reddit).

        • @[email protected]
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          51 month ago

          you just need to make sure one of your users has followed an account/lemmy community on the pixelfed side

          OK so I went to my pixelfed.social account, searched for “@[email protected]” and clicked on the “follow” button.

          and make sure a lemmy account follows an account on the pixelfed side.

          So… does it have to be a lemmy account on lemmy.world (for [email protected], say). And is there any particular pixelfed account that the lemmy account has to follow?

          Thanks for the lead.

              • @[email protected]
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                51 month ago

                I think I figured it out… consider the following links:

                These all refer to the main developer of pixelfed, dansup. The first one is dansup’s pixelfed account followed on slrpnk.net where my account is. The second one is dansup’s pixelfed account followed on lemmy.world, the biggest lemmy instance. The third one is dansup’s pixelfed account followed on lemmy.today, which is your instance.

                The account is visible to me on the first two links. HYPOTHESIS: I think that means it’s “being followed” by those instances? The account is NOT visible on the last link for me, I just get an error. NeatoBuilds, take a look at the last link: it might give you an error the first time, but HYPOTHESIS: if you refresh, I think it will be visible and that means it’s “being followed” on your instance lemmy.today.

                • NeatoBuilds
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                  21 month ago

                  Oh cool yeah I was about to find my mastodon account and see posts and i could see my pixelfed account but shows it as no posts and no way to follow them

      • @[email protected]
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        21 month ago

        Yeeees, but the two won’t generally see each other unless they try. That’s my understanding.

    • Blaze (he/him)
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      201 month ago

      According to fedidb all they need is 70k ish more people and I get will surpass Lemmy in number of users.

      Monthly active users is probably a more relevant metric

      • metaStatic
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        301 month ago

        in that case they blew past lemmy before the exodus.

        The insta crowd is super active.

        • Blaze (he/him)
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          151 month ago

          That’s great!

          It makes sense as well, IG is much more popular than Reddit

      • mesamune
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        61 month ago

        Then they doubled theirs in 15ish days, which is crazy good.

    • @I_Miss_Daniel
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      81 month ago

      I can’t log in now on Android. Could last night. Guess it’s growing pains.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        I’m not on the main pixelfed.social instance but mine went down for a bit this morning. I just waited a bit and then I was able to login again.

        Mastodon and Lemmy also had a lot of trouble even they experienced these huge waves of migrations partly because no one had scaled the software this far before

  • @[email protected]
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    621 month ago

    Kickstarter coming sometime soon to get some more resources going for it and related projects. will be interesting to see if it’s effective.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

    Dan tends to work on too many things simultaneously (which isn’t bad per say, and he thrives doing so) which means things get stalled and its a little hectic. Hoping more funds and community excitement will help spread the work out more and allow him to keep working as he does without other projects being on pause in the meantime.

    • breakfastmtn
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      271 month ago

      A few of those projects just need to mature and have teams working on them, I think. There’s nothing wrong with him bouncing around to different projects but it sucks that no one’s working on Pixelfed if he isn’t. It’d be great if he could secure enough funding for an additional paid dev on each of his major projects.

        • breakfastmtn
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          211 month ago

          Yeah, it’s crazy. Same thing for Loops, FediDB, Sup, and his million other projects. He’s a one man band right now. And he has a full-time job on top of that!

          I don’t think that can go on for much longer with Pixelfed blowing up – and they’re still onboarding about 1000 people per hour. Just for moderating pixelfed.social, he said yesterday that he’s received more reports in the last 48 hours than in the last 7 years. There’s only so many hours in a day.

        • @fuck_u_spez_in_particular
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          21 month ago

          This is not that uncommon in open source, but I’d think that something like this community project would be more decentralized, i.e. as a lot of people (especially technical people) use it, and see rough edges, that their motivation would be higher to contribute then.

  • JaggedRobotPubes
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    611 month ago

    The Fediverse needs UI work. The new world needs a new internet.

    I’m thankful we have this glorified hobbyist project of a micro internet, because it’s awesome. It’s time for real layout work to make things more intuitive, instead of this “just solder it” open-source-in-the-bad-way energy that sometimes gets half-assedly splattered around.

    For everybody who has and is working on the Fediverse, thank you.

    • @somtwo
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      301 month ago

      The reason I dislike this comment is it characterizes the work of many different people as “don’t care.” I would bet money that there are people who work on fediverse projects who care very deeply about UX but have to settle because they have day jobs.

      • @[email protected]
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        71 month ago

        The UI’s aren’t that bad. They’re replicating existing apps/styles and then bolting on features. In some clases like immich, they’re replicating them so closely they’re probably open for lawsuit :)

        Loops is 75% TikToc. Lemmy is 60% Reddit.

        If we had a couple of UI artists and Usability people join the projects and crank out designs, I wonder if the devs would implement them and spend the time making the output true to the design.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 month ago

          I only used sync on reddit and that’s all I use on lemmy, tried many of the others and they’re good but not perfect, for both the closed source and open source projects

          • @[email protected]
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            41 month ago

            I’m using Voyager. It’s amazing that we have choices.

            Reddit and Facebook’s interfaces aren’t any better than anything we’re using, and they’re full of sponsored content.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 month ago

              Voyager is pretty slick. I think it’s UI is almost perfect and waay better than the Reddit UI.

    • @WhiskyTangoFoxtrot
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      171 month ago

      “The UI is bad” is the stock attack on any open-source project. Doesn’t matter how good the UI actually is, or how bad the corporate version is, “bad UI” is such a nebulous criticism that you can apply it to anything.

      • dantheclamman
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        81 month ago

        Which is amusing, because the UX for Facebook, X and TikTok are horrendous also. So much stuff buried under layers of settings

        • @ilinamorato
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          61 month ago

          Well, that’s intentional though. The stuff that’s buried is the stuff that doesn’t make them money.

          Bad ux in open source is because nobody has any money.

          • @belit_deg
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            21 month ago

            Well, people make good code that is open source, even though it doesn’t make them any money. Same with wikipedia articles.

            So why are we not seeing more contributions in the form of better UX/UI it the open source world? I don’t see a logical reason why that has to be the case. The question is what can we do to change it, and also get UX-designers on board?

            • @ilinamorato
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              1 month ago

              I’m not saying it’s a matter of desire. It’s a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.

              Further, ux design is a less “atomic” process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.

              What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should donate to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.

              • @belit_deg
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                21 month ago

                Thank you for expanding on this topic, and I get what you’re saying about proper UX and how it requires a holistic understanding.

                It least that is what is required to climb from “ok, I guess” to “good”. But is there something that could get us from “terrible” to “ok, I guess”? What’s your take on better, clearer design guidelines for example?

                • @ilinamorato
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                  11 month ago

                  Overall, in my experience, any improvement will require the same amount of time; whether from bad to acceptable or acceptable to good.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 month ago

          “The UI is bad” = “It doesn’t feed me new and popular content automatically”

          Basically sums that up.

          • dantheclamman
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            31 month ago

            There was a point in time in OG Facebook, maybe the early 2010s, when they let you have really granular control of the timeline. Like they allowed any post to be clicked and you could change the amount you saw from that person or page on a sliding scale, and it actually worked! They of course got rid of it

      • ZeroOne
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        11 month ago

        What is a “Good UI/UX” ?

        • poVoq
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          41 month ago

          “That what I am used to with years of muscle memory and anything that is different is bad UX” usually…

    • Blaze (he/him)
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      131 month ago

      Lemmy is lucky to have alternative frontend like Photon, Tesseract and Alexandrite

    • @IndustryStandard
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      51 month ago

      This will never happen without funding. Open Source severaly lacks funding big corporations have.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 month ago

        If they made it so your average joe could contribute to the Fediverse with their own hardware I’d contribute. Tired of seeing social media be owned by Billionares.

    • ZeroOne
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      01 month ago

      I wonder if you’ll mention Gemini, just for fun

      • ArchRecord
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        141 month ago

        “You want this thing to be better? Well why don’t you single-handedly do all the work yourself then? Obviously only those with the skill to do something can hope for that thing to happen!” /s

      • @Feathercrown
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        131 month ago

        God I hate this attitude. It’s so obviously wrong and yet people fall for this trap again and again. Stop doing this please, think about it and you’ll realize it’s stupid.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 month ago

          I already know, but I also hate the “wow this shit we have sucks why isn’t it better god someone please donate their skill to improve this thing I consume for free already and also show up to complain about while doing nothing”

  • hitagi
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    471 month ago

    I was surprised when my friend casually brought up Pixelfed (he called it “Pixelfeed”) and Bluesky the other day.

    • Captain Aggravated
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      301 month ago

      For the average person who doesn’t understand or care about federated systems, “pixelfeed” is probably a better name. It feeds you pixels.

        • Captain Aggravated
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          121 month ago

          I’m guessing it’s a pun on both fed meaning “eats, runs on, is powered by” and “federation/fediverse.”

  • sunglocto
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    451 month ago

    Great! Seems like a small subset of people are coming to the fediverse again like durring the reddit blackout. Always love having more people to speak to.

  • @[email protected]
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    311 month ago

    Great stuff, I don’t do Instagram but I installed the app just to boast their numbers a little

    I’m doing my part!

    • @[email protected]
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      41 month ago

      I don’t do Instagram either but PixelFed has pretty chill vibes. I followed some hashtags like #cat and #nature and now I have a nice little feed of cats and nature.

    • AItoothbrush
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      21 month ago

      I also intalled it and im just gonna post cat and nature picks to boost the numbers and maybe even engage with the community. Never used instagram before but maybe this is the thing thats gonna encourage me.

  • unknown1234_5
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    261 month ago

    nice. I don’t like that kind of social media, but that means the fediverse is getting attention and people may start migrating here instead of to progressively more privacy-violating platforms.

  • dhhyfddehhfyy4673
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    241 month ago

    Mainstream media is an antiquated term. Been a while since they’ve been mainstream. Corporate media, or legacy media even, is more suitable nowadays.

    • Captain Aggravated
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      101 month ago

      It’s like how people still say “internet famous.” There are Tiktokkers with larger followings than movie stars these days.

      • @[email protected]
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        Is that really the same thing though? Just for a random example of the first actor that popped in my head, Chloe Grace Moretz probably doesn’t have as big a social media following as Skibidi Kid or whereas I could probably find random people in the streets in the 3rd world country that I live in if I just had to start bringing up her name without any further details. Whereas Skibidi Kid is only known by the other Skibidi kids on that particular platform and probably won’t even be a big deal next year, like Dab Kid.

        I used to see people express the same sentiment towards YouTubers and it’s the same deal there IMO. SaltyPeeDrinker or whatever might cause a big ruckus in certain circles on the internet and have a bunch of incel fans but outside of the internet and in the real world, nobody actually gives a fuck. Not in remotely the same way as with movie stars, music stars, sports stars etc. These people aren’t that important or significant, they’re just another feature of online brainrot.

        Edit: I feel like online ‘content’ creators are related to actors and musicians in the same way that AI art is related to human art or reality TV is related to Breaking Bad.

        • Captain Aggravated
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          41 month ago

          And what was everyone watching during the pandemic? Tiger King.

          You can think as much or as little of social media and/or the film industry as you like, but there a noticeable change in the older media regarding its “talent”: It’s less common for them to have personal brands, quite unlike social media personalities.

          • @[email protected]
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            I hear your point but also it might be a mostly first world thing. So kinda like comparing local country music artists to Michael Jackson. Maybe other 3rd world denizens can chip in but here (so this is purely anecdotal) but in my corner of the world, we watched movies and series and played games and shit like we would’ve pre social media.

            Personally I’m not even sure what Tiger King is (and not that interested in finding out either, if I’m being honest) and if I go outside and ask around here, I’m not sure how many answers I would get. Possibly I’d get an answer once school is out and kids are around, I guess.

            Edit: just to add, I hope this doesn’t go the same way as the time I was trying to explain to Americans that the NBA really isn’t this global phenomenon in every household and that John Cena is probably more famous here.

  • @[email protected]
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    161 month ago

    I’m so happy to see an Instagram alternative. We can continue helping people find a better way to post and engage without giving data to everyone and their mom

  • AItoothbrush
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    161 month ago

    You what we need? A snapchat alternative. I actually like the idea of snapchat even though i hate the product. Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo. And it would be pretty easy to implement probably because you wouldnt need to federate posts just send it to the users you sent it to.

    • Hanrahan
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      81 month ago

      Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo.

      You can do that with Signal ?

    • @ilinamorato
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      61 month ago

      Honestly, just building an RCS app with easy grouping, quick captions, streak tracking, and delete requests would be the way to go with this. Then you have an immediate network effect of every iPhone and Android user in the world, and you don’t have to get your friends to switch if they don’t want to.

  • Jeffool
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    121 month ago

    Just remember this when you see people complain about having to pick a server when joining Mastodon. It’s not that, maybe it’s just not easy/intuitive lile PixelFed is making it? I don’t know.

    And then when people were joining, I just saw them complaining about all the anger/aggression on Mastodon. It may’ve missed a big jump on point with Bluesky’s rise, but there will invariably be more. People just have to be ready and willing.

  • ZeroOne
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    91 month ago

    Is Loops proprietary ? (I’m being serious here)

    • @AshMeshedUp
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      161 month ago

      Dansup is required to release the source code for Loops under the Nlnet grant’s conditions I believe.

      • ZeroOne
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        31 month ago

        That clears my doubts, thank you

    • @[email protected]OP
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      141 month ago

      Source hasn’t been released, but the dev has said it will be and there’s no reason to doubt that IMO. Same dev as pixelfed which is open source and federated

  • @[email protected]
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    81 month ago

    I just joined pixelfed and I’ve been finding myself compelled to post. It just feels like such a small positive corner of the internet. I hope it can maintain that vibe as if grows