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.
But they still need your help!
Doing more fedi posting on reddit. If you’re on reddit and don’t mind being a fediverse evangelist, please go hit this thread:
Have you ever noticed that people get all nitpicky when they want to distract from the original message?
Should’ve set the goal at 100k for fulltime employment. These kinds of projects need that kind of dedication
As long as they reach the goal they keep everything donated including if it raises much more than the goal.
They’re already at 72k
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.
Huge goals can scare off people from donating/financing
That’s not huge. One year of employment is nothing for such a product.
If I’m seeing someone wants to raise 100k and I’m one of the first people to go on that Kickstarter, meaning only a tiny % is financed yet, I might think “this is not gonna make it, makes no sense for me to pledge money”
The biggest kickstarter goal I know of was the Ubuntu Edge (a linux smartphone) was 30 million and they got 12 million.
Look at the list of most successful kickstarters. There are projects with goals of 1M (books), 100k(table top game), 950k (video game console), and many more. 100k isn’t the world when talking about software like this.
It’s a lot for an average donor, though. “Huge” is not in relationship to the project’s needs. It’s in relationship to what the donor thinks is a lot of money or not.
I agree, but there’s still plenty of time for that to happen. I wish them all the success in the world.
Patiently waiting for my application to get accepted (ಥ﹏ಥ) how long does it take on average?
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!
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.
It’s really hard with small, starting instances.
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
Peertube does not suffer from this actually. On Peertube, the instances (servers) follow each other. Making all the content available on both.
That’s an interesting idea. I was wondering how it would scale, but as the network grows, even if it just grabbed some random stuff from remote instances, it would still help it grow by giving the local instance plenty of content to seed from
If you don’t hate bluesky, that’s an option as well: https://fed.brid.gy/
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
Right, but hashtags only show posts on my instance which at the moment is just me.
hmm apologies, I didn’t realize that personal instances were like that. I’m on pixelfed.de so I just shared what worked for me a few days ago.
I’m guessing you could search for a few accounts on various servers to follow directly who post with those hashtags to get the ball rolling?
Yeah, but that’s the thing. You can only search if you know the exact username of the user on the other server. But you can’t find usernames on other servers without creating an account there.
I wish it was more like Lemmy where you can browse other instances without an account at that instance.
if you feel ok sharing your pixel then I cab follow you there, might give you an in?
followed :) hope it works
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.
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?
If you’re trying to promote federation, this isn’t the way to go about it.
you take the post/user’s original URL,
Ok, but if I don’t have an account on their instance, how do I even find their URL?
I think they’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username ([email protected]) and put it in the search bar and it’ll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you’re looking at someone’s profile.
And if you want to discover new people where you don’t already know their username, then I believe that is the same as any other social media as well, you can come across them in the comments of people you follow or go to the discover tab or search hashtags and you’ll find new people that you can tap on and follow.
I feel like this basically covers how you would find people. A lot of people get hung up on how you know what instance other people are on but it doesn’t usually matter. Either someone will give you their username which includes @instance.com, or if you don’t know the instance you can search for their name and all known accounts with that name will show up.
For example if I just search my username “BakedCatboy” (not my real username), the search results show both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.
That makes sense. It is a bit ironic. Like everyone wants to go back to old Instagram where you just keep up with friends, but I think we’ve all grown accustomed to our feeds and our friends don’t have enough cute cats and dogs to accommodate our interests.
Search using tags like #comics or #food. That should give you an idea of how it works.
Edit: oh I might be wrong for new instances without established links.
I love pixelfed,I don’t love the developer…this isn’t going to do his already huge ego Amy favours
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
- 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.
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.
This isn’t art, it’s a platform, it’s a tool more akin to engineering than painting.
Would you have this same response for x, Facebook, or truth social?
I think in terms of fedi, it’s fine. I mean plenty of people think Linus Torvold is an Ass, but we all love Linux for what it is.
It’s a fair point. But then in the case of a piece of (literal) art created by a computer program, who was the artist if not the programmer? In legal terms software is a work of creativity like any other.
Perhaps the important factor is how many people are involved. To be art, there has to be a single artist.
So if two people work together on a painting, its not art?
Edge case! Maybe? Or a Beatles song written by John and Paul.
What?
he’s not even a bad guy he just gets a big head sometimes
im_doing_my_part.gif
Fuck yeah it did!!!
I love Pixelfed :3
(Hopefully they make the app good)
I use Instagram only for recipes. I hope to someday be able to replace that entirely.
