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?
Most people who might use a service like this won't know and maybe won't care what the fediverse is and what other services it's connected to. The goal should be for that to simply be the underlying standard everything else is built on, regardless of which site/client you use to connect to people.
But yeah, this is more or less federated Instagram, but the federation is still a work-in-progress, AFAIK.
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
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.
The federation side of it is pretty new and Dan wants to have the core product sorted, including security testing before federation is really pushed. There's a new post UI coming soon that looks really good.
pixelfed.social is a particular instance; https://pixelfed.org (the project home page) is probably a better overview.
Though - as that page points out - it's still a work in progress. There should probably be huge barriers to adoption for everyone regardless of nerdiness. But at the moment I'd guess they're targeting existing fediverse/Mastodon users.
To be fair, Pixelfed is in its early shoes. I know it from a "alternatives to Facebook etc." list but it still has to gain some traction mike Mastodon. However - and that's the problem - as long as you build an ethical service you probably won't reach the masses, because non-ethical platforms will always outperform you, and if it's just by how much they spend on marketing.
It's actually a pretty obvious Instagram knockoff if you go to the homepage. They have almost pixel perfect identical landing pages, and the app also looks extremely similar.
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.
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?
Funny enough, choosing a node wasn't such a show-stopper for users ten years ago and before. I've used local email services in my backwater town, hanged out on local forums. The entirety of Fidonet was built on people connecting to their acquaintances—and it was rather popular here almost until the 2000s.
As for the present, I'm sorta baffled that the anarchic dream of decentralization turned into not-quite-that-cool federation where you're tied to an instance, instead of the identity working across the net. If my chosen server goes down, I'd love to be able to just move to another one with my keys.
That's easily done now with personal backups, and can be added onto any federated network that gains enough popularity. Mastadon is probably approaching that.
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?"
> 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.
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.)
Until recently most people just took the provider that cane with their isp because they were usually tied together. It was either that or AOL.
Nowawadys it’s either hotmail/office365/whatever other name it has or gmail. It used to be a federated system and still sort of is, but your experience is vastly diminished if you aren’t using one of the biggest providers because you’ll have deliverability problems.
I've had these issues myself, and know the "stereotype comes from somewhere", but...does anyone work off of anything besides anecdata in discussion re: the stats behind this position? It's very defeatist.
I worked in email deliverability for years. It's absolutely true. Mainly because the big providers work together to make sure that their mail is successfully delivered to each other, and they also work with big corporations.
I was working on it when I worked for ebay and PayPal. I was working with Yahoo (who was big at the time) on what became DKIM, which was created to make sure that Yahoo mail was delivered successfully and that ebay and PayPal mail would be delivered successfully, among lots of other big corps.
Sure, anyone can use those technologies, but only the big players run interoperability tests on a regular basis, and provide reporting to each other, and other big corps.
Email is a different kettle of fish. It got in there first and only really competed with snail mail. Other alternatives were arguably more complicated. There was no easier alternative to fall back on. If you wanted to communicate on the internet, you had to use email, and by the time there were alternatives, it had a large enough user-base which meant that it was never simply going to be displaced.
I could be wrong here, but I believe that for most ordinary people, AOL messaging and even CompuServe boards were in common use before Email. The email "standard" had to displace those.
I never used CompuServe forums but my understanding is that they were public internet forums, not exactly something that could be used for personal/private messaging. Newsgroups (often used with an email client) pre-dated CompuServe forums by a decade and I'm pretty sure they had a much larger user-base.
AOL Instant Messenger didn't come out until 1997, email was already in heavy use by then.
Scroll a bit down and you'll see that you can filter through the servers based on your language and interests, as well as see the amount of users each server has. https://joinmastodon.org/
> For federated services how do you think we best solve this?
For distributed services, the solution must be such that the question "Which pod do I choose?" makes no sense. (There may not be a solution, in which case this may be distributed solutions' Achilles' Heel.)
Not the domain name, but the provider definitely makes a difference. What's the spam filtering like? What's the privacy policy? What's the sending reliability (are you sharing the platform with spammers?) What's the uptime like?
Unless the auth database is also distributed and you get to log in as yourself from any pod, it does matter.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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. :)
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.
What’s made you sick of IG? Besides the news feed not being chronological order, nothing has susbtaintially changed for my day to day casual IG usage in a pretty long time. Yeah there are stories and more ads. If I don’t care about those, they can be easily
ignored.
Just seems a bit extreme to be sick of something for things you want to ignore that aren’t even that bad. You could say except ads but businesses need to make money
This is another reason to prefer federation: your social graph is not owned by (at the mercy of) a business whose interests may not even be aligned with yours (bad advertising is only one of the many consequences of this).
> extreme
I'd not call "there's something better" an extreme approach. The maintenance burden is what makes federated services difficult to operate. That's the issue right now, but people are working to resolve that too.
I’d love federation to work out. I’ve unfortunately lost most hope.
The comments there show other problems too. Other problems that may never be solved. For example not being able to take your social graph with you if you change Mastodon instances. Having issues with the admin or an instance seems like it’ll happen often enough. But you’re essentially punished for that. That’s just one example.
It is good though that people are trying to solve the problems. Hopefully my cynicism will be proven wrong and I’ll only be happy about that.
For now I am still on Reddit but another open source alternative to Reddit that I learned about earlier today is 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.
I used Tildes during the first round of public closed alpha and it's pretty nice, everyone was polite, and they didn't put up with rude folks or bullshit trolls. I ended up quitting because there wasn't enough content at the time and I was wasting too much time there, like I did on Reddit. However, I would say it might be worth going back there to check it out again. The platform itself is open source, I believe, and it uses as little JS as possible to make the site simple.
> Decentralized communities are interesting and have a lot of potential, but that model also introduces its own problems and difficulties. Tildes is already attempting to do quite a few things differently to improve the quality of online communities, and I'm more interested in focusing on those goals without introducing the additional complexity of decentralization.
> However, since Tildes is open-source, someone else could certainly use it as a base for their own decentralized version.
I'm not interested in running a decentralized version myself, but I'd love to see someone else try to make it work.
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
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.
I love the spirit, but I feel like it's gunna be hard for a straight-clone decentralized site to gain traction. I think you need to combine fresh site ideas along w/ the decent to really gain traction.
Sorry to hear that! It shouldn't have any issue w/back button so if it did it's definitely a bug. It's a very new project and hasn't been tested on a track-pad yet but thanks for reporting!
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.
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...
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.
- If an instance is going to shut down for any reason, how you can handle your account and your content? Do you lose all your follower base and/or content? Can you transfer your account to another instance?
Questions about the whole federated ecosystem that I never saw answered completely.
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.
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
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.
Alternatively, does it integrate with Mastodon in such a way that Mastodon hosts could easily offer immediate access to Pixelfed for their already registered Mastodon users without requiring any additional form filling etc on the part of their users?
By that I mean, does Pixelfed integrate with Mastodon in such a way that a Mastodon server could also run a Pixelfed server instance, and use the same user database for both services?
For example, the Mastodon server I am on, vis.social [1], seems like a place whose user base might want to use Pixelfed. That Mastodon server describes itself as “a social space for anyone in data, visualization, creative coding, and related arts and research.” (Said description is what prompted me to choose this specific server when creating my Mastodon account.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yes, it is using ActivityPub, the same federation protocol as Mastodon.
Pixelfed is fairly new, and probably should get it's minimum viable product working before worrying about supporting more formats. And there's a lot of ActivityPub-based software out there, it makes sense to focus on a specific experience people are looking for.
You host Pixelfed where you want to, or use someone else's Pixelfed server. As long as either you or someone else is paying to host it, it's there.
ActivityPub style federation isn't like IPFS. Data is largely still contained on the server it's posted on, but you can communicate with other servers so that people can be notified, interact, and comment on things posted on other servers. But it's a much more traditional server model than IPFS. When a Mastodon or Pixelfed server goes offline, it's content is gone.
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.
Apps is being worked on by several independent developers, just like with Mastodon. Pixelfed also works well as a PWA, which I currently use on my Android phone.
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?