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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”
I’m guessing it’s a pun on both fed meaning “eats, runs on, is powered by” and “federation/fediverse.”
Cool
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.
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
Mine started working again :)
I need to set my own instances…
Does Lemmy federate with pixelfed posts?
Yeeees, but the two won’t generally see each other unless they try. That’s my understanding.
Kinda
The Fediverse way.
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).
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.
The Lemmy account has to follow the Pixelfed account that is going to post to Lemmy
How do you find a pixelfed account through lemmy?
I think I figured it out… consider the following links:
- https://slrpnk.net/u/[email protected]
- https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]
- https://lemmy.today/u/[email protected]
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.
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
search @[email protected] and you should see the user pop up.
@[email protected] just like any other account. It should show up. Another option is to search for the post on the top of lemmy and then navigate to their account.
Example: @[email protected]
If that doesnt work, you can try this: https://lemmy.world/u/@[email protected]
in other words your telling lemmy to go to his personal account, which happens to be on another server.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
Then they doubled theirs in 15ish days, which is crazy good.
in that case they blew past lemmy before the exodus.
The insta crowd is super active.
That’s great!
It makes sense as well, IG is much more popular than Reddit
Cum into the watercooler…
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
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.
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.
FediDB
Wait, he’s behind FediDB too?
Cool!
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.
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
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.
This is great! Pixelfed has been getting an influx of new users lately and it makes me happy that these sites are getting more traction!
I’ve heard discussion of Pixelfed on both TikTok and RedNote, which is exciting! Hopefully it’s easy to use.
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.
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 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.
I did the same thing!
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
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
Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo.
You can do that with Signal ?
Is Loops proprietary ? (I’m being serious here)
Dansup is required to release the source code for Loops under the Nlnet grant’s conditions I believe.
That clears my doubts, thank you
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
Now all we “need” is a Facebook-like platform on ActivityPub and the set is complete
Thanks for reminding me of Friendica
