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!
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
you could try following people from here: https://fediverse.info/explore/people?t=photography
Cool link! Thanks
If you don’t hate bluesky, that’s an option as well: https://fed.brid.gy/
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 read that as feces and got confused why it was pretty and all lol
It’s some pretty good shit
I love pixelfed,I don’t love the developer…this isn’t going to do his already huge ego Amy favours
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?
the difference is the level of control
X and Facebook are closed source, so you can’t review them and they could be hiding stuff in their code or just do things people don’t like and we can’t revert
they also control the servers and don’t let you self host, so they can make bad admin decisions and there’s nothing we can do
and they also horde the content so you can’t get it from somewhere else, which means you can’t just leave and use a different platform (not easily at least)
over here if you don’t like the devs then you don’t need to donate to them, you don’t need to use their instance, or we can fork their code, or even use an alternative (like Mbin vs Lemmy)
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.
he’s not even a bad guy he just gets a big head sometimes
I love Pixelfed :3
(Hopefully they make the app good)
Pixelfed is growing like crazy (as always make sure to read the Y-axis labels)
https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Hopefully they get good integration with Lemmy and get some of that content showing up over here too lol
I have to admit that the name hits hard. I had trouble setting up an account but I’ll check it out once the servers stabilize.
I use Instagram only for recipes. I hope to someday be able to replace that entirely.
