Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
Available Soon.
Dansup is well known for making grand announcements and delivering on them very late or never. I think it was more than two years ago that he announced federated groups for Pixelfed and still nothing. So I wouldn’t get my hopes up yet.
He is a bit bombastic, and has a habit of biting off more than he can chew sometimes. I think these side-projects are ultimately useful, though, and probably help fend off boredom or burnout. Maybe he gets better at coding and design through doing that, I dunno.
Regardless, he’s continues to do a lot of great development work.
Sup messenger too, but it’s on hold due to EU regulatory challenges
And I agree, Dan is a great asset to fediverse development
He’s periodically shown updates on it. From talking to him, there are a number of challenges:
I think the biggest thing is that he probably does spread himself pretty thin at times, and is still learning how to rely on community pull requests and contributions. It can be a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel the need to provide the creative direction for how things ought to work.
That’s my main concern. Seeing content from other platforms in my Mastodon feed is pretty great right now (Lemmy, PeerTube etc). But hashtag feeds could quickly get overrun by something like this if it works the same way.
That said, making this its own thing instead of building a “reels” for Pixelfed suggests the dev already knows separation will be important, so 🤞
@thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)
But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.
What's so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.
And there's *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I'm not interested in.
They're not there because I'm interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app's owners.
Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they'll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you're interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.
And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there's always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.