Pixelfed gets a mainstream media mention

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

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.

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.
- 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.
"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.
- Which is amusing, because the UX for Facebook, X and TikTok are horrendous also. So much stuff buried under layers of settings
Lemmy is lucky to have alternative frontend like Photon, Tesseract and Alexandrite
This will never happen without funding. Open Source severaly lacks funding big corporations have.
- 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.
Waiting on your obviously so skilled patches to make it happen.
- "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
- 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.
- After you

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.

Does Lemmy federate with pixelfed posts?
- Kinda
- 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.
- 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).
- Yeeees, but the two won't generally see each other unless they try. That's my understanding.
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
- in that case they blew past lemmy before the exodus.
  
  The insta crowd is super active.
- Then they doubled theirs in 15ish days, which is crazy good.
I can't log in now on Android. Could last night. Guess it's growing pains.
- 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
I need to set my own instances…

Cum into the watercooler....

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

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

For the average person who doesn't understand or care about federated systems, "pixelfeed" is probably a better name. It feeds you pixels.
- tbh I always thought of the original name as “being fed by pixels”

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.

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.
- Holy shit, no kidding. He has the most commits by a long shot. 9991 commits vs the #2 at 210 commits.
  
  Maybe with this attention the app is getting, it can kick off like mastodon.
  
  Anti Commercial-AI license

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.

Signal has a lot of overlap there. They've got disappearing messages and Stories
Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo.

You can do that with Signal ?
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.
Signal could provide that with a few more features

My first Loops video! And it's just a download from TikTok. 😕

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.

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

It's like how people still say "internet famous." There are Tiktokkers with larger followings than movie stars these days.
- 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.

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

I’m doing my part!

I did the same thing!
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.
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.

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.

Good for Daniel. 💜

Here's to hoping for more and more attention!

I've heard discussion of Pixelfed on both TikTok and RedNote, which is exciting! Hopefully it's easy to use.

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.