Mastodawn

You may have noticed we've taken a bit of a break from Pixelfed lately. We were kind of thrown off by the fact that several of our Ukraine trip pics were being removed from the Pixelfed Local Feed moments after we posted them. We reached out to @admin @pixelfed to see why this kept happening but never heard back. This really had us stumped because we thought we were leaving shady social media politics behind when we abandoned Meta. 🤔

As independent artists/designers we'd certainly be best served by steering clear of all controversy and focusing on our wares. But we can't help ourselves. We wear our hearts on our sleeves and when we have transformative experiences - like a trip to a war torn country - we want to share them with you. And we'll have this impulse even if it means getting shadow banned from a platform. It's a risk we'll take to maintain our humanity in the short lives we live.

While we had planned to share many more pics from our Ukraine trip, we're going to cut this series short in order to give the platform some time to figure its shit out.

We'll finish out the next few rows in our grid layout and then we'll move on. We may pepper in the rest of this series at a later date if we feel the platform has matured and is able to receive the content without bias.

In the meantime, since we are designers and we are aiming for an aesthetically pleasing feed, we're going to archive our last two posts about censorship. But we'll screenshot them so we can continue the conversation here in the comments of this post.

We know this has been an earful so we'll leave you with this photo of some statues overlooking the vehicular wasteland of the wreckage of war.

#platform #politics #censorship #humanity #expression #independent #artist #designer #traveler #nokings #nooligarchy #makeartnotwar

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Andrew

I’m leaving. The local feed is growing full of junk.

I’ve seen your reach on other platforms and am truly puzzled why you’d come back here.

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X Over Zero 6d ago

😿 we hate to see you go. Will you be on a different platform or are you scrapping social media all together?

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Andrew 6d ago

For a while, I’ll be out completely. I’ve bounced around Mastodon since the great Twitter exodus that one November.

Honestly, I am here as an admirer more than a contributor. There’s only so much an iPhone camera can do (that’s all I have), and there’s only so much I can share as an introverted homebody who only travels in his own mind. My unique experiences are few and far between.

Wherever you go, I will remember you both as artisans and explorers. I’ll be looking in from the outside for now and maybe we will meet again some sunny day.

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X Over Zero 6d ago

It totally sucks that people like yourself are leaving the platform but we can't say we don't get it. Pixelfed seems to have developed a very narrow minded focus that can feel a bit alienating. We're hoping these are just growing pains and that it will evolve into something more well rounded, but to do that without getting overrun by spam may be a hell of a challenge. We do have an infrequent newsletter and we just started a mastodon account if either of those are more your speed : ). And thank you for the heartwarming compliments, it's really nice to hear. 😊🙏 We wish this platform would make a better effort to retain posters like you who are real people sharing their genuine experience.