Pixelfed Smashes Kickstarter Campaign Goal on Day One
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Huge goals can scare off people from donating/financing
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Ok, so I spent the weekend getting my own Pixelfed instance working for my friends who want off Instagram.
My big question, is how do you discover new content?
Sure you can follow people on other instances, but how do you find them in the first place?
Also, basically all of the content I’ve been able to find so far has been artsy photos of fences and beaches and whatnot. It’s pretty and all, but there’s not much of humanity in my feed.
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That's not huge. One year of employment is nothing for such a product.
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I love pixelfed,I don't love the developer......this isn't going to do his already huge ego Amy favours
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?
How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?
How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?
The fediverse has way, way, way more in common with the Internet of 2005 than it does with the Internet of 2025. You have to act more like it's 20 years ago.
Pixelfed not a centralized service. It's a web engine. It's something that lets you host your own photo sharing website. If you want to syndicate stuff from someone else's website, you need to find it on their website first. Fediverse websites just let you do the syndicating by automated request.
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It's a lot for an average donor, though. "Huge" is not in relationship to the project's needs. It's in relationship to what the donor thinks is a lot of money or not.
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It's really hard with small, starting instances.
Basically, the only content that gets federated to you is content produced by someone that a person on your instance follows. And once it federates to you, it becomes searchable and viewable to other members on your instance. Which means that the more people you have, the more content gets federated too you, and the easier it is for your users to find new content.
And new users that no one on your instance follows at all won't appear to any of your users in searches etc, which is where "boosting" a post comes in. If I post a photo, and no one on your instance follows me, none of your users will see it. But if someone that they do follow, follows me and likes my photo, they "boost" it, and then it appears in the timelines of people that follow them. And then once a single person on your instance starts following me, my future content will start federating to you.
Which means that as an admin, the best thing you can do is start up a seed account, and just follow lots and lots of people. Follow random people. Follow anyone and everyone, just so you get a critical mass of content sliding to your instance.
This is a problem that all fediverse platforms suffer from. The initial hump to get good visibility of federated content is a challenge. Once you cross it, you're fine, but to cross it, you either need to be patient and give it time, or you need to artificially kickstart it
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
Search using tags like #comics or #food. That should give you an idea of how it works.
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follow some of the bigger hashtags to get input, from there you can branch out and follow specific accounts (and unfollow the original hashtags if you want).
a few bigger ones are bloomscrolling caturday mastoart photography silentsunday fensterfreitag
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
It's helpful to be able to appreciate art without worrying too much about the artist. In history the number of genius artists who were bad people - it's basically off the scale.
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Right, but hashtags only show posts on my instance which at the moment is just me.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
you take the post/user’s original URL,
Ok, but if I don't have an account on their instance, how do I even find their URL?
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?
How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?
How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?
If you're trying to promote federation, this isn't the way to go about it.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
I think they're making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username ([email protected]) and put it in the search bar and it'll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you're looking at someone's profile.
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
That makes sense. It is a bit ironic. Like everyone wants to go back to old Instagram where you just keep up with friends, but I think we've all grown accustomed to our feeds and our friends don't have enough cute cats and dogs to accommodate our interests.
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hmm apologies, I didn't realize that personal instances were like that. I'm on pixelfed.de so I just shared what worked for me a few days
ago.I'm guessing you could search for a few accounts on various servers to follow directly who post with those hashtags to get the ball rolling?
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
he's not even a bad guy he just gets a big head sometimes
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[email protected]replied to [email protected] last edited by
This isn't art, it's a platform, it's a tool more akin to engineering than painting.
Would you have this same response for x, Facebook, or truth social?
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Yeah, but that's the thing. You can only search if you know the exact username of the user on the other server. But you can't find usernames on other servers without creating an account there.
I wish it was more like Lemmy where you can browse other instances without an account at that instance.
