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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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. But I already can follow from Mastodon which is really cool because it's a different software.

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.

What's the author's handle? I'd be interested in following to see what's happening.

https://mastodon.social/@dansup

Thanks.

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.

Different instances https://the-federation.info/pixelfed

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 clicked the link and... have no idea what this is.

To be quite honest that's the same reaction I had when I first landed on Instagram's homepage. Then of course, everybody was talking about it...

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