I just joined pixelfed and I’ve been finding myself compelled to post. It just feels like such a small positive corner of the internet. I hope it can maintain that vibe as if grows
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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Cum into the watercooler....
I'm so happy to see an Instagram alternative. We can continue helping people find a better way to post and engage without giving data to everyone and their mom
You what we need? A snapchat alternative. I actually like the idea of snapchat even though i hate the product. Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo. And it would be pretty easy to implement probably because you wouldnt need to federate posts just send it to the users you sent it to.
Just sending a random picture to your freinds every day is a cool thing imo.
You can do that with Signal ?
Signal has a lot of overlap there. They've got disappearing messages and Stories
Honestly, just building an RCS app with easy grouping, quick captions, streak tracking, and delete requests would be the way to go with this. Then you have an immediate network effect of every iPhone and Android user in the world, and you don't have to get your friends to switch if they don't want to.
Signal could provide that with a few more features
I've heard discussion of Pixelfed on both TikTok and RedNote, which is exciting! Hopefully it's easy to use.
The Fediverse needs UI work. The new world needs a new internet.
I'm thankful we have this glorified hobbyist project of a micro internet, because it's awesome. It's time for real layout work to make things more intuitive, instead of this "just solder it" open-source-in-the-bad-way energy that sometimes gets half-assedly splattered around.
For everybody who has and is working on the Fediverse, thank you.
"The UI is bad" is the stock attack on any open-source project. Doesn't matter how good the UI actually is, or how bad the corporate version is, "bad UI" is such a nebulous criticism that you can apply it to anything.
It’s a stock attack because unfortunately it’s generally a pretty safe attack vector
Which is amusing, because the UX for Facebook, X and TikTok are horrendous also. So much stuff buried under layers of settings
And none of those settings will give you the experience you actually want.
There was a point in time in OG Facebook, maybe the early 2010s, when they let you have really granular control of the timeline. Like they allowed any post to be clicked and you could change the amount you saw from that person or page on a sliding scale, and it actually worked! They of course got rid of it
Well, that's intentional though. The stuff that's buried is the stuff that doesn't make them money.
Bad ux in open source is because nobody has any money.
Well, people make good code that is open source, even though it doesn't make them any money. Same with wikipedia articles.
So why are we not seeing more contributions in the form of better UX/UI it the open source world? I don't see a logical reason why that has to be the case. The question is what can we do to change it, and also get UX-designers on board?
I'm not saying it's a matter of desire. It's a matter of time. A full-time developer has to feed their family, so they have to put most of their time into the stuff that makes them money. That means that their passion project is just naturally going to get less time as a function of the number of hours left in the day and the amount of energy for coding that the developer in question has.
Further, ux design is a less "atomic" process; small amounts of time working on ux is going to have less impact than small amounts of time in coding. A programmer could conceivably fix a bug or make a minor improvement or feature request in ten minutes, and a Wikipedia editor could spend ten minutes improving the grammar and punctuation of an entire article; but the ux process requires mockups, iteration, asset creation, and coding for every change—and even if that can be done in ten minutes, the rest of the ui will look completely different, meaning that the overall ux will be worse than before, despite that one thing looking better.
What can we do to change it? Companies that rely on FOSS should contribute to projects so that the people who work on them can afford to do so at least part-time, or empower their own employees to contribute to FOSS on company time. Those are really the only two options, barring some sort of UBI or public grant for open source software.
Thank you for expanding on this topic, and I get what you're saying about proper UX and how it requires a holistic understanding.
It least that is what is required to climb from "ok, I guess" to "good". But is there something that could get us from "terrible" to "ok, I guess"? What's your take on better, clearer design guidelines for example?
"The UI is bad" = "It doesn't feed me new and popular content automatically"
Basically sums that up.
The reason I dislike this comment is it characterizes the work of many different people as "don't care." I would bet money that there are people who work on fediverse projects who care very deeply about UX but have to settle because they have day jobs.
The UI's aren't that bad. They're replicating existing apps/styles and then bolting on features. In some clases like immich, they're replicating them so closely they're probably open for lawsuit :)
Loops is 75% TikToc. Lemmy is 60% Reddit.
If we had a couple of UI artists and Usability people join the projects and crank out designs, I wonder if the devs would implement them and spend the time making the output true to the design.
I only used sync on reddit and that's all I use on lemmy, tried many of the others and they're good but not perfect, for both the closed source and open source projects
I'm using Voyager. It's amazing that we have choices.
Reddit and Facebook's interfaces aren't any better than anything we're using, and they're full of sponsored content.
Voyager is pretty slick. I think it's UI is almost perfect and waay better than the Reddit UI.
Lemmy is lucky to have alternative frontend like Photon, Tesseract and Alexandrite
This will never happen without funding. Open Source severaly lacks funding big corporations have.
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This is great! Pixelfed has been getting an influx of new users lately and it makes me happy that these sites are getting more traction!
I was surprised when my friend casually brought up Pixelfed (he called it "Pixelfeed") and Bluesky the other day.
For the average person who doesn't understand or care about federated systems, "pixelfeed" is probably a better name. It feeds you pixels.
tbh I always thought of the original name as “being fed by pixels”
I'm guessing it's a pun on both fed meaning "eats, runs on, is powered by" and "federation/fediverse."
Excellent. They are seeing huge growth. I'm hoping it's sustainable, the main server is just getting slammed right now (according to the mastodon posts).
According to fedidb all they need is 70k ish more people and I get will surpass Lemmy in number of users.
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Mainstream media is an antiquated term. Been a while since they've been mainstream. Corporate media, or legacy media even, is more suitable nowadays.
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Kickstarter coming sometime soon to get some more resources going for it and related projects. will be interesting to see if it's effective.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks
Dan tends to work on too many things simultaneously (which isn't bad per say, and he thrives doing so) which means things get stalled and its a little hectic. Hoping more funds and community excitement will help spread the work out more and allow him to keep working as he does without other projects being on pause in the meantime.
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Great! Seems like a small subset of people are coming to the fediverse again like durring the reddit blackout. Always love having more people to speak to.
Great stuff, I don’t do Instagram but I installed the app just to boast their numbers a little
I’m doing my part!
I don't do Instagram either but PixelFed has pretty chill vibes. I followed some hashtags like #cat and #nature and now I have a nice little feed of cats and nature.
I also intalled it and im just gonna post cat and nature picks to boost the numbers and maybe even engage with the community. Never used instagram before but maybe this is the thing thats gonna encourage me.
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