After years of hardcore development, the Pixelfed project is taking a big next step by seeking crowdfunding dollars on Kickstarter.
Pixelfed has been making incredible strides over the past few years, and has begun developing a suite of different platforms and services for the #Fediverse. After just one day on Kickstarter, they've already smashed their campaign goal.
That's good news. I imagine it will diminish quickly unless the story about TikTok is kept alive. The news cycle is mostly 1-2 weeks. Hopefully it'll have reached 100k by then.
One that jumped out to me was folks bashing the security of mastodon because things like DMs were visible to instance admins. Like yeah I guess it's not great, but I trust my DMs with my instance admin more than fucking Musk...
Ok, so I spent the weekend getting my own Pixelfed instance working for my friends who want off Instagram.
My big question, is how do you discover new content?
Sure you can follow people on other instances, but how do you find them in the first place?
Also, basically all of the content I’ve been able to find so far has been artsy photos of fences and beaches and whatnot. It’s pretty and all, but there’s not much of humanity in my feed.
Basically, the only content that gets federated to you is content produced by someone that a person on your instance follows. And once it federates to you, it becomes searchable and viewable to other members on your instance. Which means that the more people you have, the more content gets federated too you, and the easier it is for your users to find new content.
And new users that no one on your instance follows at all won't appear to any of your users in searches etc, which is where "boosting" a post comes in. If I post a photo, and no one on your instance follows me, none of your users will see it. But if someone that they do follow, follows me and likes my photo, they "boost" it, and then it appears in the timelines of people that follow them. And then once a single person on your instance starts following me, my future content will start federating to you.
Which means that as an admin, the best thing you can do is start up a seed account, and just follow lots and lots of people. Follow random people. Follow anyone and everyone, just so you get a critical mass of content sliding to your instance.
This is a problem that all fediverse platforms suffer from. The initial hump to get good visibility of federated content is a challenge. Once you cross it, you're fine, but to cross it, you either need to be patient and give it time, or you need to artificially kickstart it
follow some of the bigger hashtags to get input, from there you can branch out and follow specific accounts (and unfollow the original hashtags if you want).
a few bigger ones are bloomscrolling caturday mastoart photography silentsunday fensterfreitag
The thing that I hate about the bridge is that, I need to separately bridge my account with bluesky to interact with a bluesky account bridged to fediverse.
How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?
How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?
How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?
The fediverse has way, way, way more in common with the Internet of 2005 than it does with the Internet of 2025. You have to act more like it's 20 years ago.
Pixelfed not a centralized service. It's a web engine. It's something that lets you host your own photo sharing website. If you want to syndicate stuff from someone else's website, you need to find it on their website first. Fediverse websites just let you do the syndicating by automated request.
To initiate the syndication request, you take the post/user's original URL, paste it into your website's search bar, and then hit enter. It will request and fetch that content, creating a local copy for you. From there, you can follow the person who originally posted it, creating an auto-syndication relationship.
It's helpful to be able to appreciate art without worrying too much about the artist. In history the number of genius artists who were bad people - it's basically off the scale.
Hers a list of Fedi based projects where parople have said the same thing
Mastodon
Lemmy
GotoSocial
Bookwyhrm
Then step outside that
Linux
GNU
Then stuff like
Meta
Twitter
Microsoft
Apple
Oracle
AI
Do anything and some people will dislike you. I save my loathing for the commercial projects and the inevitable enshitiftacion of the internet that they necessarily add to.
To be fair, the flagship instance recently had a surge of 200,000 new sign-ups. Dansup mentioned to me that he's currently seeing like 50 new posts every minute. He's probably scrambling to upgrade infra.
I had a feeling it was something like that 😅 I'm excited for the platform and for the future of the fediverse, and I hope the upsizing is as painless as possible!
I waited like 2, maybe 3 days to get approved for Pixelfed.art back around late Dec/early Jan. Since the spike of TikTok users happened after me, it might be more time. Have patience comrade, you'll get there 👍