Pixelfed Users - Thoughts so far?

anolemmi@lemmi.social to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 74 points –

I’m using the Test Flight beta app, curious on others’ overall experience with the platform so far. I never had an Instagram account so I’m not really sure yet what I even want from it. I’m just excited on all things Fediverse and I’m happy to be part of the growing numbers.

Any tips for content discovery? Seemed like that was the limiting factor off the bat, I like to start new platforms with the equivalent of a trending or all, didn’t seem to have that here.

Happy to take links for your favorite users that deserve a follow!

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It's been a couple months since I tried it. There were too many dick pics for me. And, really, not enough pictures from creators I know. However, I did get to see a bunch of beautiful photography and a few pet pics that were good.

I chose a smaller instance when I joined. Haven't seen a single dick pick. But ended up blocking some hashtag to avoid Reddit NSFW content stealing.

I think the key to Pixelfed is following hashtags and being busy. I post the occasional pick and generally leave it at that. But it's a very nice platform.

I had a similar experience, also hard to find interesting things because searching tags didn't seem to work well. Maybe there isn't enough stuff uploaded yet.

Been running my own instance for a couple months now, just for me and my friends, so that they would stop sharing private pictures on platforms that would process/sell the data. But, as always when it comes to new, privacy-respecting tools, I'm having the hardest time making them move to the platform, despite the fact that the Pixelfed instance itself has been running smoothly.

Any tips on setting it up for such a purpose?

I was thinking of doing something similar for my friends and I

I used YunoHost to set it up.

My first idea was to have the instance locked behind the YunoHost auth, since Pixelfed supports LDAP.

But I could not manage to make the LDAP work, so I went instead with a public instance that has ActivityPub disabled and all posts set to "Followers Only".

People could also set each of their accounts to "Private", but the follow requests were not working when I first set up the instance.

I’m a very light user but so far so good. My usage has been mostly browsing photos.

The official app is nice. It’s Instagram like in layout and works well for my uses.

I prefer a third-party app called Vernissage because photos are the main feature. You don’t see any titles, descriptions, votes, comments unless you tap into the photo. My one dislike is how the feed updates.

When you open the app and new photos are ready you’ll see a number in the top right but nothing new is displayed. In order to see new posts you need to pull down to refresh. This takes you to the top and then allows you to scroll down until you see the “You’re all caught up” notice. To me it would be nice for the new posts to load automatically. Not a huge deal but something I think about while using it.

I think it's absolutely excellent and considerably more polished than projects like Lemmy, the only problem is that nobody I know is on there!

I don't like it much. It's slow and a pain to use. The main developer keeps on starting new projects instead of improving the one's they already have.

It promised instagram impot, but I have bee ryin for weeks and nothing :(

Have you reached out to who is hosting your instance to ask (if it's not you)?

Yes, as I understand it's the main instance

I think it's worked well for what it aims to be. I've mostly used the official app (Android) but also tried out Fedilabs. My main complaint isn't really for the Pixelfed, but rather in Fediverse itself needing me to have a different account on each platform, rather than a Fediverse account I can use from all platforms. I know I can technically do a SAML login to Pixelfed with my Mastodon account, haven't tried it yet, but I assume it wouldn't work like truly using a common account. Like I imagine posts on Pixelfed aren't there linked as posts my Mastodon profile.

It just makes a new pixelfed.social handle if you do that

Yeah that's what I figured. I went a read the original blog post and when that said it even copies all your follows it was pretty clear it's not using a single unified account.

I like pixelfed.social, but I'm an admittedly "lite" user of Instagram, don't really post my own stuff, just use it to find interesting photos. It's been good for that.

As consumer (don't really post) I have no idea how to find follows. I don't have Instagram to bootstrap from like did with Twitter and mastodon.

I’m unable to upload a single photo from the TestFlight beta on iOS 16.6. Gives me an error every time.

The Instagram archive upload has a set limit and since my archive is larger than the limit, it times out and reloads the desktop webpage every time I try to upload it.

I'm still just waiting for a Canadian instance to move my account to 😄

I have never used Instagram either. But something similar where you can be semi-anonymous could be interesting i guess. Depends on the content. If it's about showing off and being influencers, I'm not interested.