It’s a ghost town (much like this comment thread). ;)
Being an early adopter can be boring sometimes.
Yes, I have a user on pixelfed.social. I like it, and use it daily.
It is kind of like Instagram, but in the fediverse and is open source.
A cool feature Pixelfed has is the ability to follow hashtags, so your home feed will be a mix between posts from the users you follow and the hashtags you follow.
ability to follow hashtags
Are hash tags working for you? Whenever I click on a hash tag, it takes me to a missing page.
Yes, the hashtag feature works for me. Are you logged in to Pixelfed? It seems like you have to be logged in to be able to see the hashtag feed.
Hmm.. that may be the case on some instances (e.g. pixelfed.social), but I know an account is not required on others because I’ve tested it on several instances without registering. The only one it breaks on is pixelfed.social, which unfortunately is also the largest instance.
But still good to know, thanks for pointing that out. It’s too bad the unauthenticated discovery is still broken, though.
I have posted some pictures I've taken from hikes, and check in now and then when I feel like posting something or looking at pictures.
My experience is very different from what other people here seem to report. I am just posting into the void, I have posted 11 pictures to date, and I never linked the account to anything or told anyone about it. Still I have more than 50 followers, only from people who stumbled over my content and decided to follow. I'm only following half of that number, so it's not a politeness thing.
I've also gotten a few comments, though mostly people just click like and/or boost. It seems every time I post something I gain at least a follower or two.
So overall I'm pretty impressed by PixlFed. If you have something to share it's a good platform to do so. And there's nice landscape photography on there, at least.
I used to be into Instagram for the photography communities, now I'm exclusively using Pixelfed.
It's obviously not as good, and there isn't as much account variety, but it's getting there!
I use it fairly frequently and enjoy it! My instance is Pxlmo but it hardly matters, federation doing its thing and all. The official app is quite buggy atm, but not unusably so, and it's fun to watch the updates slowly improve things. I do follow a lot of people who are actually on mastodon but only ones who mostly post pictures anyway, so they fit better in my pixelfed feed.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention! I also kinda use it as image hosting for other apps! Only for pictures worth posting though, not trying to clutter it up. All my picture posts on Lemmy are stored there. If you put the direct link to the pic in the Lemmy image field, it shows up just as if you'd uploaded it directly to the post, no click-through necessary.
Interesting tip on linking the url, I will try it. Tested it in the past but I think I did something different and didn’t work as I hoped
Interesting, maybe it didn't used to work! It does have to be the direct link to the image, if that helps. Like, "right click on image, open in new tab", then use that link? The link to the post itself doesn't do it.
That must be it, I wasn’t smart enough to link the actual image URL, I linked the post as you wrote 😆
I haven't figured out how to find good photographers to follow but my last two posts there has both gotten over 25 likes which is more than I used to get on Instagram so I guess that's something. My only complaint is how much they scale down my pictures and absolutely butcher the quality.
This is a setting by the admin of that Pixelfed instance. Try another instance, if you are unhappy with the quality.
Since storage costs money, does it allow the admin to offer tiered access to higher quality storage?
Well damn. I already copied my entire Instagram library there so I guess I'll just deal with it.
Also consider that Instagram uses aggressive image compression and then you import from that to Pixelfed, which also does its own compression. No wonder the quality is questionable.
Have you tried adding an original image to Pixelfed?
Pixelfed is awesome. Like a lot of Fediverse things you have to follow just about every hashtag to get enough content. I love particularly all the human made art, although I also follow a lot of AI art. Compared to other social media it is oddly peaceful and calm, no ads, no algorithm forcing engagement means you can safely go down some obscure rabbit holes and keep your peace of mind. Fediration itself between softwares is a work in progress, Lemmy/Mastadon/Pixelfed often does not work and even migrating all your follows from one instance to another isn't user friendly too. Considering that all this was done without billions of corporate dollars and with volunteers doing all the work, its a nice place to visit.
Sign up on mobile was absolute trash, completely buggered and I had to sign up over the web in the end (which then told me my username was taken FFS). A big put off.
Love what the dev is doing, but he needs to get the basics right before plowing ahead with features.
Instagram for geeks. My geeky followers follow me there, the normal people are still on Instagram where I post the same.
I use it a little bit. I think it's pretty good but I don't come from Instagram or anything like that, so I had no expectations. And I only use it very sparsely. I'm guessing that if you're a heavy browser you might run out of content. But for me personally such platforms are more for posting photos than endless browsing.
I'm not the biggest fan of the UI of the official app, but it's not bad bad.
It’s a cool concept with a lot of potential, but currently very buggy and incomplete. For example, basic functionality like hash tags need to be fixed and federated for it to be usable IMHO. It has piqued my interest, though, so I might sign up someday if the usability issues are ever addressed.
The official app appears to be written in React Native and is as laggy and janky as you’d expect. Other than that, more people are using it (and/or interacting with it from elsewhere in the fediverse).
I do have an account (and PixelDroid installed on my phone), but most of the accounts I'd follow there I've already got added to my Mastodon, so I don't check it that often.
I like it but I wish I can migrate my account. When I moved to a friend's instance I had to manually upload all the photos and descriptions . I wish it was like peertube where I could just sync .
"Fed" pertains to federation so it kinda works. Compare that to Lemmy or Mastodon that have no relation at all to the fediverse (AFAIK).
I’m a huge fan of the fediverse and I didn’t even get the fed reference haha. A typical user surely wouldn’t get it either!
Agreed, IRL people say the same thing and stuff like eww The Fed.
Not sure what he's supposed to do about it now, even PixelMail could have done the thing explaining that its federated
You mean the thing for hosting galleries because Lemmy can't do that yet and Imgur won't work on Mobile without an app? Yes.
As a social network? No, and even when I tried it wouldn't let me switch my post's visibility from unlisted to public, so I shrugged and used it as an image host as I'd originally intended.
Can someone less lazy than me explain how it's functionally different from sharing images on e.g. mastodon?
Mastodon is about micro-blogging, with text, images and videos. PixelFed is only about images which can have a short or longer description. There's Loops, a work in progress, which will enable short videos for PixelFed. If you would follow others on PixelFed from your PixelFed account you'd only see images.
Yes I'm on it, and don't post much, I guess to dip my toe to check it out but while I take photos for myself I don't look at the photos of others. I was never on IG at all so ...