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Comment by beardicus | Hacker News Reader

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. :)

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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.

It's a good theory in general, but I think in this specific case it's because there's one dev and he works on this in his spare time.

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.

E.g. some people don't want to be forced to ignore things.

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

> 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.

> https://blog.datproject.org/2019/03/22/three-protocols-and-a... > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466929

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.

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