Mastodawn

@pixelfed It would be nice to have the ability to have pixelfed be a "proxy" account that only shows images/videos from a activity feed or a way to easily also have them posted on a mastodon profile.

Deuchnord Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian @pixelfed you don't have to. You can follow Pixelfed profiles from your Mastodon account. That's the power of the Fediverse!

@Deuchnord @pixelfed I know. However, others would need to follow both profiles to get everything I post.

Deuchnord Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian @pixelfed yes, exactly as they need to follow both your Twitter and Instagram profiles if they want to see posts on them. The difference being Mastodon and Pixelfed communicate together.

@Deuchnord @pixelfed There is a toggle in Instagram to post to a connected Twitter account. ;)

Deuchnord Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian @pixelfed on Mastodon, you can boost Pixelfed statuses :)

Vint Prox Jan 19, 2023

@Deuchnord @bastilian @pixelfed ohho, sounds like checkmate there

Oook Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian @pixelfed

What would be nice is an activity pub mecanism that let you link account from different fediverse platforms/apps/instance so that for instance you have a pixelfed account, a write freely and a mastodon account so that you can trigger an action so that a pixelfed image or a write freely blog post can be automatically boosted and visible to your mastodon account by an action on those respective platforms/clients without having to copy/paste stuff manually.

Or maybe we have to develop a multifediverse client for that. Sounds like the ring to rule them all in tolkien's stories :D

Joan CiberSheep (ell/això)Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian I don't know if it's what you're asking, but you can follow pixelfed accounts. They will show up in your timeline of mastodon :)

@cibersheep That is neat, yes, but what I would want is for followers to not have to follow both, but be able to push updates from pixelfed to another profile, without posting or boosting manually.

Joan CiberSheep (ell/això)Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian I see...

🪨Jan 19, 2023

@bastilian @pixelfed You can just boost your Pixelfed posts from your Mastodon account

@pixelfed The "problem" however starts where there are features that don't work well for other platforms. In example: pixelfed supports ten images per post. Friendica does support multiple images as far as I can tell. Mastodon however will only display four of them by default. Same way, Mastodon or Friendica don't display stories at all. On the other side, media views in Friendica and Mastodon are ugly so portfolio is an incredibly great feature. You're perfectly right, the process of capturing and editing visual content requires a different workflow than, say, posting short- or long-form text content. But... shouldn't at this point, this only be a matter of a dedicated _client_ for posting content to a more "general-purpose" network? Wouldn't it at this point suffice saying pixelfed comes down to a dedicated (frontend? mobile?) "app" to post content to whichever activity-pub aware system you could come up with...? Compatibility is better than competition for sure, but maybe re-use and not-reinventing-the-wheel is even better than compatibility...? 😉️

James J Malcolm Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @pixelfed
That’s what I was thinking.
I’m wondering what the difficulty would be for logging in with a mastodon-activitypub account. Does the account need to be be able to save different things on a different server?

@jamesjm As far as I remember, some people out here (@one ?) managed to use #pixeldroid to log in to Friendica too, with the usual effects ("works somehow"). Biggest issue I see at this point is ... that even in activitypub, client-server APIs are proprietary for virtually all apps and platforms. There is activitypub-cs too, but I am only aware of @AndStatus to support that, which is a neat app but most likely not what you'd like to use for pixelfed.
@pixelfed

Matthias Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @pixelfed
Using the Pixelfed app with Friendica works surprisingly well. But of course only within the supported processes of the app and without deepDive by hardcore users.

@one (Just to clarify this is @PixelDroid , not the "pixelfed app". Quite good nevertheless... 🙂)
@pixelfed

Matthias Jan 19, 2023

🤔🤭

@one This one ( mastodon.social/@pixelfed/1097… ) doesn't seem to work with anything but pixelfed so far... .

Matthias Jan 19, 2023

@z428 I don't understand the discussion here. The (once again) insufficient functions of Mastodon should be compensated by other project?

Mastodon is what it is. A microblogging that can't do much more than send short texts. If you want more, you have to use another project.

@one No real discussion I guess. The point I was trying to make (starting with the original post) at large is that maybe having fewer independent "platforms" and more client applications dedicated to specialized use cases might be a better way to help people utilize the Fediverse at large than to re-build totally new platforms full-stack several times. In this case: Maybe pixelfed in general might have been better off being "just" an image-centric desktop/mobile app talking to Friendica, Pleroma, Mastodon, ... backend rather than a wholly new platform. YMMV. 😁

eyajpng Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @one I mean…that’s still an option? Nothing about Pixelfed is preventing that idea from being developed?

@jepyang No. 🙂 That's where I actually hope for, in example, pixelfed client apps to work well with other platforms, or (dreaming) generally having a portable, standardized client-to-server API for such apps. At the moment, I use #fedilab with Friendica and pixelfed and it doesn't too much make a difference which platform I'm connecting to, but the tool itself isn't too image-centric at the moment.
@one

schoolingdiana Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @jepyang @one Is there one that works better with Apple products? I see some that sound like Android compatible, but that could just be the name that was chosen for it.

James J Malcolm Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @one
Exactly - being able to save everything to the same account on the same server is key to really deliver the benefits of having one federated protocol.

It’s of course quicker and easier to evolve functionality with your own app and our own extensions to the protocol.

Hopefully the particular extensions each app invents can be fed back to the main ActivityPub standard to ensure compatibility and evolve the standard as a whole.

schoolingdiana Jan 19, 2023

@z428 @one Twitter and Instagram are exactly that (different projects) so I’m missing what point that was. You can cross post IG to Facebook, so I would assume folks are already familiar with that connectivity concept: Pixelfed and Mastodon being part of the FediVerse.

@schoolingdiana Yes, but to be honest crossposting always felt like an ugly workaround in situations that were or are missing real interoperability... 🙂
@one

Jon Jan 19, 2023

@[email protected] @pixelfed I think we need to look at this differently. The fediverse does not mean an equal feature set on all platforms. Federation is a more general idea where you can interact with users on other services but they won't necessarily get the full story. Activity hub offers a baseline set of features that permit basic interoperability.

So to your point about clients vs servers, apps that use Activity Hub are different from just Mastodon. They may have their own code base with their own features, and for that you need the server to implement the features along with the client to work with them. The powerful part is that all these separate services are not islands. Think about it this way: what if Instagram, Twitter and Facebook could all interact. What would that look like? Instagram doesn't have all the same features as Twitter, but they can each handle displaying basic posts with pictures and text.

@JonEFive I don't generally disagree but see two problems here: First one is "wasting" effort on reinventing the wheel. Simple example: Even by 2023, pixelfed still has quite some rough edges to fix in terms of working federation of posts and comments. Why spend energy on that if there already are working, libre implementations that do exactly that and rather good already? And, then, talking protocol features: With a lot of different understandings and implementations of activitypub, we're somehow likely to again walk through a lot of interoperability issues platforms such as e-mail or XMPP haven't solved in a satisfying manner in decades (in example for e-mail leaving text/plain the only thing you can be sure everyone is able to handle, even in 2023). From that point of view, I wonder what's the win for accepting these conditions... not even talking about limited resources in terms of development and support volunteers in general, these days.
@pixelfed

AndStatus tester @ mstdn.io Jan 20, 2023

@z428 When we consider viewing #Pixelfed, #Friendica, #Mastodon, etc. "platforms" via the same client app, usage of the same client to server API (#ActivityPub #C2S) looks promising. But in the simplest implementation we will see only "timelines" of text and media.
Features like "Stories" and "Portfolio" require organizing, grouping of some "activities" of that timelines.
"Conversation" is the limited way to "group"...
@one @jamesjm @pixelfed

Kristian (inactive/moved)Jan 20, 2023

@t131t1 Yes... That's why I still think it would require more "use-case specific applications" on top of that, but also some considerations what interoperability between these might mean in the end. I mean, everyone of us is _sure_ e-mail and WWW are two totally different services, even though both of them are built on TCP. Maybe we should get the idea that macroblogging, microblogging, image sharing also are pretty much "different", with a very small set of shared features, even though all of them can be "somehow" connected via a protocol such as ActivityPub? Maybe we need way more to think about how this interoperability should look like, first and foremost from an end-user, not from a technical perspective? That seems a bit lost all along the lines...
@pixelfed @one @jamesjm

Scott M. Stolz Jan 20, 2023

One thing that is often overlooked is simply linking to the original content in addition to attempting to render it locally. That way, there are two views available: the view of whatever app you are using, and the view of the app where the content originated from.

For example, if a portfolio is being shared over ActivityPub, different platforms might render it differently. Having a prominent link back to the portfolio would allow people to see it as it is intended.

Another example is that some platforms strip out most formatting. Mastodon is one of those platforms. But if you go to the original post on the sending platform, you will see rich formatting.

Platforms have to be willing to link to other platforms for this to work though.

cc: @Kristian @smallcircles (Humane Tech Now) @AndStatus tester @ mstdn.io

[email protected]Jan 20, 2023

@scott Exactly for the cases when you want to check "how this looks at the sourse" #AndStatus app has "Open in Browser" context menu item that links to the original URL of the note.

Scott M. Stolz Jan 20, 2023

@[email protected] Hubzilla has that too. But for certain type of content, like videos or portfolios or longer blog posts, I think the link should more prominent.

Ronnie Soak Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed Will we see more image-editing tools for this purpose in the future?
Like removing metadata, rotate, change order, blur/pixelate regions, draw-on/write-on?
That's what I'm missing vs. IG and what could make the real difference comparing to mastodon alone.

pixelfed Jan 19, 2023

@Chaos_99 Yes

Ronnie Soak Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed 👍

Stefan です Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed Thanks for your hard work on Pixelfed! I'm still having issues with federation between Pixelfed and Mastodon though. My test comment from Mastodon recently once again did not arrive in Pixelfed: https://hachyderm.io/@stefandesu/109637792600886221 The favorite (sent around the same time) arrived instantly though, and it seems to be working perfectly the other way around (i.e. replies from Pixelfed to Mastodon arrive instantly too). Any ideas?

Stefan です :blobfoxteaowo: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] A test comment from Mastodon to Pixelfed

Hachyderm.io

eyajpng Jan 19, 2023

@stefandesu @pixelfed I’m also having issues with mastodon/pixelfed compatibility. Seems like the idea is that I should be able to follow a Mastodon account from Pixelfed and see all their image/video posts, but in actuality when I look up mastodon accounts on PF, there’s usually a *lot* of missing media posts, and it’s not clear to me why.

Vint Prox Jan 19, 2023

@jepyang @stefandesu @pixelfed I noticed the same case with #PeerTube. But unlike with photos, you need to attach even more info to the video that you can't on Mastodon, so this incompatibility is more explainable than of Pixelfed. 🤔

Dorian Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed I really like the Pixelfed app but I was expecting I could log in with any Mastodon account

Cảm ơn Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed I’d like to add my endorsement to those who’ve suggested linking Mastodon accounts or finding a way to cross post via Pixelfed. There are some thriving photography communities already in the Mastodon ecosystem that would really benefit from the Pixelfed UI and feature set.

Goz 🕹Jan 19, 2023

@CamsJam @pixelfed I have the same issue with the ActivityPub plugin on my Wordpress instance. What I do is follow my Wordpress account and manually boost posts from my regular Mastodon account. It's a pain, but works.

Cảm ơn Jan 19, 2023

@goz @pixelfed it shouldn’t be this complicated in my extremely unqualified opinion

Louis Khor Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed Love it! I've taken to following Mastodon accounts on Pixelfed exactly for this reason. So I can get/focus on the account's visual content.

I don't see boosts, and I don't see text only posts - which is how I want to consume a given account's content.

Unstopped Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed I"m waiting for iOS app to be launched.

Unstopped Feb 4, 2023

@pixelfed The same, the app looks great and the most important it dose respect our privacy.

Aoikurayami Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed
you forget to tell them about the part,
where everyone (mastodon, friendica misskey etc) can follow your pixlfed OR be followed by you.

Can IG do that ?
I.
think.
not.

𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘅𝗪𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed Can you follow Pixelfed accounts from within Mastodon?

Josh

Jan 19, 2023

@wessexweather @pixelfed Yup!

𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘅𝗪𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 Jan 19, 2023

@Nolasox @pixelfed Thanks Josh. I can feel a project coming on!

𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘅𝗪𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 Jan 19, 2023

@Nolasox @pixelfed I’d like to join @dansup pixelfed.social but it seems to be closed to new registrations. Hard to know which node to sign up to.

Dominic Nieto Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed does this not work with Mastodon.social?

Travis Tubbs Jan 19, 2023

@pixelfed My fav thing is the Collections feature. It’s like having Google Photos and Instagram rolled into one!

𝗠𝗔𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗠𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗠𝗔𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 Jan 28, 2023

@pixelfed hello pixelfed. i have an account at pixelfed.social/@mastomememakers

-i use it as a hall of fame for my old memes; is there any way to edit posts? (thought i wouldnt need hashtags for old memes, big mistake) best regards and thanks for all your efforts

𝗠𝗔𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗠𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗠𝗔𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 Jan 28, 2023

@pixelfed

phase 3: bargaining

...or mavbe a delete-redraft feature?