
Pixelfed – An alternative to centralized image sharing platforms - colinprince
https://pixelfed.social/site/about
======
jedberg
I clicked the link and... have no idea what this is. It looks like instagram
maybe? I can't even figure out how to figure out what it is. The only
clickable thing I see is "@admin" which just takes me to what looks like an
Instagram page. It doesn't even mention fediverse on that page, and even if it
did, you'd have to know what the fediverse is.

This feels like a huge barrier to adoption for them beyond the nerdiest of
nerds.

I like Instagram because I get to see what my friends are up to. How will I
get my friends on this?

~~~
deft
It is an instagram knockoff. I think they are avoiding the fediverse mention
on purpose in order to get users by just marketing it as an alternative
without any special magic. This about page as a landing page is really
confusing but the homepage doesn't do much better... Also registration is
closed so this is a really strange time to be advertising

~~~
r3bl
The author posts regular updates on Mastodon that I follow. From my
understanding, federation is relatively new, and he seems to focus on
expanding the functionalities of the core product right now instead of
focusing on the presentation.

So indeed, it is a bit of an awkward time for it to be on the front page here.

~~~
coldacid
What's the author's handle? I'd be interested in following to see what's
happening.

~~~
kpcyrd
[https://mastodon.social/@dansup](https://mastodon.social/@dansup)

~~~
coldacid
Thanks.

------
wicket
> Registrations are closed.

I think the lack of a common name/URL is the biggest problem that is
preventing federated open source social networks from gaining mass popularity.
I remember when identi.ca came out as an alternative to Twitter. It seemed
like it was starting to gain some traction, then they switched to pump.io and
closed registrations. I haven't heard of anyone using either since. Look at
Diaspora, that never took off either. You might convince someone to try it
out, they'd go to the website and it'd be too complicated for them. "Which pod
do I choose?" Then they would just go back to using Facebook and Twitter.

~~~
evolve2k
> Which pod do I choose?

That is actually a great UX question. For federated services how do you think
we best solve this? I mean everyone wants to just not pick one. But different
loss suits people better in terms of location/interests/something else.

UX folks, what patterns would you suggest to help solve this?

~~~
derefr
Which email provider do I choose?

Email is a mature example of a federated system, and so if there is an answer
to the general question, I'd expect we'll have figured it out in the context
of email.

So... what's the "general strategy for picking an email provider?"

~~~
Spivak
> So... what's the "general strategy for picking an email provider?"

Pick Gmail unless you have a good reason not to. And if you don't know any
reasons pick Gmail.

Federation sounds nice until you realize that most people don't have
particularly unique needs and a 'best for most people' will eventually emerge
and dominate the market.

~~~
eitland
But instances aren't competing for users. There's no account fees, no ads,
seems most big instances rely on voluntary donations to keep running.

You are also free to set up your own instance(s) and you can follow anyone.

Otherwise, stick to an instance with people like you (i.e. don't put your
account on a gardening or knitting instance if you are primarily going to post
and read about FPS gaming as it will mess up the instance timeline for
everyone else and you'll have little use of the instance timeline.)

------
grumpy-cowboy
I'm in the process to move out mass-surveillance social sites like FB,
Twitter, Google, ... I'm about to install my own Matrix and ActivityPub nodes
(Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, ...) on a cheap VPS.

I also have my own email domain hosted at Fastmail.com (I don't want to manage
an email server).

This way I'll manage MY own data. I'll share it with who I want. And it's a
fun project. :)

~~~
acdw
Could you share a bit what VPS you'll use to host your ActivityPub? I've been
wanting to do this too, but I have no idea at all where to begin.

~~~
Kovah
As there are simply no providers yet who offers ready-to-install packages of
all these services (at least I don't know one), you go with that service you
trust and that suits you best. Some examples for relatively cheap VPS are
Digitalocean, Vultr, Linode or, if you want to host somewhere "safe":
Exoscale, which has datacenter in Switzerland and Germany.

~~~
acdw
Thanks for the tips! I'll look into them.

------
AJRF
Thoughts on federated services;

Just silly ramblings that hopefully open up a discussion because god knows I
don't have the answers, but I do have ideas.

1\. How do I get my friends to use them - Solution? Maybe we now live in a
world where privacy being part of the public discourse would enable something
wonderful like a rich person who cares about this to spend for an ad campaign
altruistically (I'm thinking in the vein of Brian Acton giving money to Signal
foundation). That would be an effective seed to start a social network. Really
play on the failures of modern social; Facebook (privacy), Twitter (sloppy
moderation & bots) Google+ (...)

2\. For the most part, no one cares it's federated. The upside of federation
is "unstoppable" apps (to steal from Ethereum). Okay fine it's federated, just
make the UX of finding and jumping into those fediverse's easy. Pinterest
model of discovery would lend itself to fediverse discovery, i.e I type a
search term - show me related fediverse.

3\. Make it known to the people it matters to, in simple terms about how you
don't track them. This is really really important. People care about being
tracked, but unless you make it super simple and informative that what you do
is different, how can I see that using something that is open source,
federated and made by people who care about privacy is actually going to
reduce tracking? Startpage and Mozilla do good work here about describing the
state of the union, and how what they do is different.

~~~
StudentStuff
I've not done anything beyond linking friends to funny/high quality posts on
the Fediverse, and already a few have made the jump. For many instances, there
is a very high signal to noise ratio that is an enticing factor for outsiders
to join (if the user shares the interests of the instance).

The UX for boosting, replying and interacting with users on other instances is
pretty straightforward, you merely fill your handle once when trying to
boost/reply to a post found on another instance (if you don't follow or
otherwise have a copy of that toot on your local instance) and it will OAuth
(IIRC) to boost/like, or redirect you to your instance if you chose the reply
option (with said toot your replying to pulled up). Overall pretty slick IMO.

One factor in this is there is generally not a wall between linking users to
content on the fediverse, and them being able to view it. No Quora, Twitter or
Facebook full screen popups that cut off reading a thread or toot, just here's
the thread :P

Open linking/access to public toots unlike other "social" media is a big
differentiator.

------
beardicus
I've signed up for Pixelfed. It's nice enough. It doesn't seem like actual
federation between Mastodon or other Pixelfed instances is up and running
though. You can follow a Pixelfed account in Mastodon but not vice versa.
Maybe I'm just doing something wrong.

Anyways. It's fun... I post silly inconsequential pictures because I know only
a half-dozen people will ever see them. The public timeline is not very lively
so I hope w/ better federation and more attention it can be a little more
active.

I'm pretty sick of Instagram though, so Pixelfed and the fediverse in general
seems fun.

The web app is fine and works fine on mobile. A little clunky, but that's how
I likes my indieweb. :)

~~~
thebaer
That's pretty much how things are developing in the fediverse: each platform
meant for its own content type, with the microblogging platforms generally
being used for a "main" identity. So platforms like Pixelfed and Peertube can
focus on photos and videos, respectively, while still interacting with the
larger network.

By not supporting following in the other direction, these specialized
platforms can stay focused on the content shared there, instead of also
supporting microblogging, video, photos, events, and whatever other types come
up in the future. But of course you're not limited to just following in one
direction -- comments go both ways. So someone can comment on your Pixelfed
photo with a Mastodon account, and you can respond to that comment with your
Pixelfed account, and they'll see your comment back on Mastodon.

~~~
Kye
It's a good theory in general, but I think in this specific case it's because
there's one dev and he works on this in his spare time.

------
muvek
Twitter alternatives (mastodon), instagram alternative (pixelfed), reddit
alternative (prismo.news)... Things are looking great!

~~~
codetrotter
For now I am still on Reddit but another open source alternative to Reddit
that I learned about earlier today is
[https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/). Judging from the amount of votes
and comments they have very few users as of yet. Will be interesting to see
how Tildes develops over time.

~~~
AsyncAwait
[https://tildes.net](https://tildes.net) doesn't seem to be federated. Is it?

~~~
Quanttek
How do you get an account there?

~~~
Deimorz
Just send me an email - the address and more info about the site are in the
announcement post (offer's open to anyone else that's interested too):
[https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-
tildes](https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes)

I send out invites daily. It's not intended to be difficult to get an account,
I just want to prevent it from getting out of control when it gets a huge
burst of attention due to situations like a subreddit getting banned.

~~~
Quanttek
Thank you! I reached out

------
pixelfed
Hi, pixelfed developer here[1].

Thanks for all the feedback! The project is still pretty young and we look
forward to shipping a stable release in the coming months!

[1] -
[https://mastodon.social/@dansup/101780180126913256](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/101780180126913256)

------
an4rchy
On first glance, looks like a decentralized Instagram.

A couple of questions:

\- What is the business model? If millions of people are on this and there's
no ads/monetization -- how is the service covering costs?

\- If people had to pay, then it might limit adoption, how are you going to
handle that?

\- How are you guys thinking about support, monitoring content (removing
illegal/copyrighted content)

~~~
messo
There is no corporation and no business model, and that's by design. Each
instance can do what it wants regarding covering the cost of running the
server. I plan to set up my own instance on my modest homelab for family and
friends, and will not charge anything. Some bigger instances might choose to
offer a certain amount of free storage before requiring to pitch in to cover
the costs. My guess is that a big majority of instances will be populated by
10-200 users, give or take, which would be feasible to keep running with
minimal cost and a modest amount of administration.

Regarding moderation; I'll keep my family and friends under control and bigger
instances will have to delegate moderation rights to trusted members of that
community – much like on any forum. It's a far more sustainable model compared
to the nightmare Facebook and Twitter, which is relying heavily on algorithms
and outsourcing.

~~~
draugadrotten
Moderation is important in today's world, compare the massive work twitter,
instagram et al have had to do as a result of the Christchurch massacre.

How does this scenario work with pixelfed? I take it that the content is
hosted on a specific server and that the pixelfed app is just a frontend that
knows how to find that server. Is abuse reporting built in to the app somehow?
How does the end user know that action is being taken? How can law enforcement
close down pages?

Note that legal liability for hosting illegal content may be huge. There is
one 18-year old in NZ who is being charged and threatened with 14 years
jailtime for sharing the terrorist video from the mosque massacre.
[https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12213914)

~~~
messo
The content is stored on servers run independently from each other and they
usually operate with slightly (and sometimes wildly) different rules.

Users can report posts which then has to be looked at by the mods on that
specific instance/server. Since most servers have a modest amount of users,
and a relatively high moderator to user ratio, moderation becomes quite
manageable.

------
carlchenet
The social network Mastodon, also based on a Free Software and using
Fediverse, reached 2M+ uses recently [https://carlchenet.com/do-not-ignore-
the-mastodon-social-net...](https://carlchenet.com/do-not-ignore-the-mastodon-
social-network/)

PixelFed has a possible awesome future ahead!

------
soared
Link should be changed to the homepage instead of the current weird page that
has no info

[https://pixelfed.social/](https://pixelfed.social/)

~~~
veb
Yep, we definitely have to update that page ASAP. Maybe next time it hits HN
we'll be ready. If anyone's interested you can see from my Mastodon what I've
boosted from PixelFed:
[https://mastodon.social/@veb](https://mastodon.social/@veb)

------
fosco
from pixelfed site:

Supported Fediverse Projects

This is a partial list of well known supported projects

    
    
        Anfora – Self-hosted photo gallery social network.
        Pleroma – A federated microblogging alternative.
        Mastodon – A federated microblogging alternative.
        Misskey – A federated microblogging alternative.

------
coldacid
Signed up but still waiting for them to introduce Instagram importing. I have
quite a few pics on there and I want to completely move over without losing
the order and posting times of my Insta account.

------
jesse_m
can you browse without signing up? I'd like to follow from my mastadon client

~~~
robrtsql
I'm wondering the same. I wanted to look at a Pixelfed instance to see if it
was worth joining (or following from a different account in the
fediverse)--and I can't even see whether or not I like the content without
making an account?

I can see why a for-profit app like Instagram would force everyone to sign up
to browse, since that helps their bottom line, but I can't see why that
decision would be made here.

~~~
TicklishTiger
Instagram does not make you sign up to browse.

[https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/ycombinator/](https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/ycombinator/)

This seems to be the url to browse tags on pixelfed.social:

[https://pixelfed.social/discover/tags/ycombinator](https://pixelfed.social/discover/tags/ycombinator)

Unfortunately it wants you to sign in.

~~~
beardicus
It looks like you can at least view profile pages without logging in. Here's
mine, as an example:

[https://pixelfed.social/beardicus](https://pixelfed.social/beardicus)

------
jcfrei
I think I understand the mission: A federated alternative to instagram where
anybody can create a server which is accessible to other users on the
fediverse network (doesn't have to be pixelfed). But I don't think this is the
right approach. If the public really wants to compete with large internet
corporations then there needs to be a single non-profit organization akin to
the Wikimedia Foundation which runs these social media applications. Of course
it's both legally and technically a less resilient setup than a federated
network. But you are never going to cause a significant part of the population
to switch to a federated image sharing platform - not least because most users
aren't going to understand the concept.

If you really want people to move away from social networks run by for-profit
corporations then you need a single non-profit organization with a charismatic
leadership, a captivating mission statement and lots of people to create
public awareness.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Wikimedia Foundation which runs these social media applications.

Then you just moved the centralization to a different entity. Wikipedia has
plenty of problems, power plays, politics, bullshit process, bias etc.

~~~
jcfrei
The goal of such a foundation wouldn't be to remove these issues - which are
inherent to any type of organization - it would be to stop the ongoing erosion
of privacy.

------
cedricbonhomme
What I really like is that thanks to ActivityPub it is possible to boost a
Pixelfed post in Mastodon. Basically in the fediverse...

~~~
veb
I constantly boost my PixelFed posts in Masotdon :) It's such an awesome way
of doing it. My latest toots are in fact, from PixelFed:
[https://mastodon.social/@veb](https://mastodon.social/@veb)

------
soared
> Registrations are closed.

Can someone explain this?

~~~
Roujo
As I recall the idea was to promote looking for a Pixelfed instance with a
community that fits your needs and interests, which in turn makes the network
stronger by distributing the userbase over a variety of servers.

Keeping registrations open on what is often perceived as an "official"
instance can lead to that instance getting most of the new users of the
network, since it's usually the one you'll find if you search for the
corresponding software. mastodon.social (previously open, now invite only) is
a good example of that, IMO. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing, but I
do feel it subverts the idea of a federated network if most users are on a
handful of known instances.

~~~
screaminghawk
That's a nice thought. I'm the kind of user that's going to give up and move
on if my first attempt fails, and I imagine I'm in the majority here.

~~~
jeena
Why would Mastodon or Pixelfed need users who give up that easily? Those most
probably won't be good citizens anyway and they would not post and create
content because it's too complicated.

I don't think it makes sense to have non-active members just for faking the
numbers if it's non profit anyway.

------
amelius
A few questions:

Is this compatible with existng solutions like Mastodon?

And why just images? Why not videos/documents/music or even events?

How long will the images be available? Who is paying for storage?

How does the technology compare to IPFS?

~~~
phoe-krk
1) Yes, these speak the common ActivityPub protocol.

2) It's purposeful specialization. PeerTube is a video hosting service,
Funkwhale is a music hosting service, GetTogether is an event hosting service.
No idea what services provide online document services - they likely aren't
ActivityPub-compatible.

3) Ask the administrator of your instance. The Fediverse, of which PixelFed is
part, is composed of a mesh of networked instances.

4) I don't have enough IPFS experience to answer.

~~~
thekyle
> No idea what services provide online document services - they likely aren't
> ActivityPub-compatible.

Nextcloud is ActivityPub compatible and might suit that use case.

~~~
phoe-krk
Does NextCloud have some document editors built-in?

~~~
simcop2387
Yes,
[https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/](https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/)

------
herodotus
You can register - go to [https://pixelfed.social](https://pixelfed.social) I
uploaded a picture and that worked too.

------
jklinger410
Will be on board as soon as it has an app.

~~~
eitland
For now at least it is a "web first" experience.

I think more things should be "web first". Today even Reddit keeps tirelessly
pushing an app - for a web site!

~~~
jklinger410
Instagram is an app first, website second. As an Instagram clone that's
primarily how I intend to use it as well.

------
kaffeeringe
I love it!

