Mastodawn

pixelfed Jan 19, 2023

Mastodon supports media uploads, so why should I join Pixelfed?

When you filter out the text posts and only see photos/videos, the experience changes.

The process of capturing & editing photos/videos requires more effort and curation than a simple text-only post.

Portfolios are one example of this, a feature that gives artists, creators and photographers their own portfolio website https://portfolio.pixelfed.social/dansup

We ❤️ Mastodon, compatibility not competition is what makes the fediverse so special!

@dansup's Portfolio

pixelfed

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Kristian (inactive/moved)Jan 19, 2023

@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...? 😉️

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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.

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Kristian (inactive/moved)

@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