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Comment by cowsup | Hacker News Reader

Never heard of Pixelfed, but it's sort of shady that, the moment they received notice that they shouldn't be copying a trillion-dollar company's product 1:1, they immediately cry that they need more donations.

Just rename the filters, and maybe make tweaks so they aren't exactly the same, and then suddenly Meta has no standing.

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> Never heard of Pixelfed,

You may not have but that community is actually very active. I posted 5-6 photos on pixelfed and it had more engagement than my total Instagram engagement over 5-6 years.

I don't doubt it. I just wanted to specify that I've had no prior bias one way or another with regard to the service.

Lol, it's federated, you don't post "on Pixelfed" you post on whatever host you're on and maybe that host is federated to lively other hosts

This doesn't feel like a helpful response.

I understand that pixelfed is federated, but I still knew exactly what the commenter meant when they said they posted "on pixelfed". They meant they posted on an instance running the pixelfed software.

It seems like it was effective communication to me, and your correction seems both dismissive and unhelpful.

Yea. And you’re not “on the internet”. It’s a series of nodes that talk with each other and route requests between them. /s

There is no strict technical definition of “on” in this case.

Well. The fact that there is way less photographers on it may help.

Your insta is probably shadowbanned (or whatever nonesensical synonym they’re using nowadays to describe shadowbanning style moderation).

how is an open source project asking for donations "shady" ? Is my money going to go to some nefarious ends?

This is Hacker News. OSS is supposed to be a good thing.

I just gave them $50, support creators, especially here where we are all benefiting as creators ourselves.

The shady part to me is Pixelfed vaguely mentions that Meta is "threatening legal action," and then they ask for money immediately after. This paints a David and Goliath tale, where Instagram sees a small startup taking away their users, and is trying to sue them into oblivion, and our donations will directly help. Instead, a later follow-up posts reveals "Well it's just due to the filter names."

I'm sure Pixelfed is a much better alternative to Instagram (I use neither), but the immediate segue from "Meta is threatening legal action" to "Please donate" implies that donations will be used to cover legal costs, when it sounds like the problem is pretty easily solved.

If you run an open-source project funded by donations, it is ok to ask for them every time you get any publicity. There is nothing shady about that.

Well, with a multi-billion dollar company knocking on the door, they know they may need absurd amounts of money for lawyers, so it makes sense to ask for donations should the situation escalate beyond what pro-bono lawyers can handle.

At the core, the problem is that the US doesn't have many protections for individuals and small businesses that need to fight against mega-corporations. It's simply infeasible to achieve anything outside of small-claims court. Europe is a bit better, but not by much.

If I were a small open source project with the prospect of a legal battle on the horizon, I’d want to start raising money for it before, not after, the litigation begins.

It appears that in this case, litigation is avoidable. The project would be purposely engaging in a legal battle at their communities dime over some names.

I would be very surprised if you could guarantee that a litigious entity will not sue on any grounds. I don't think think removing the obvious reason to sue is sufficient protection from the possibility of a lawsuit.

You’ve heard of them now :)

Good for them to call out bullying to spread awareness of their product.

Bullying? Really?

I like how you call this bullying, when all they did was rip off another company's product interface 1:1 and then cried foul when they got called on it. Imagine it were reversed. If a large and well financed corp released a product that was an exact copy of a small company's product, you'd blame the bigCorp for stealing the work and using their industry position to annihilate the small company.

Then again, I guess nobody gets fired for bashing Meta. (In this one case, I'm actually on Meta's side. Might be a second time for me)

i mean there are thousand of small photo sharing apps, and instagram was hardly the first... Naming the filters the same seems a bit stupid though...

Yea. That’s the part that is ripped. Making a new photo sharing app shouldn’t be controversial.

I like Pixelfed, but it was naive to rip the filter names and think that was somehow ok. It was also a totally unnecessary thing to copy. An imitation filter could be called anything and people will be able to tell (assuming you did a good enough job imitating).

Seems that they have done just that.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/4037

Or maybe it's a good thing that they are standing up to a 'trillion dollar company'. More people should be doing this.

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