Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?
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I read the post and understood the problem. Then I read Dan's reply. And he's fixing it. In fact, he's fixing it in the exact way the blog post says it should be fixed, "... but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable."
Here's Dan's reply:
"... I hear the community: you want text-only posts. We are going to build this as an opt-in feature. If you want microblogging, turn it on. If you prefer the classic media-only experience, nothing changes."
Why was this blog post even written then? Now it's seeming to be personal.
Seems like the article was written first maybe?
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The Fediverse has plenty of problems but...this ain't it.
A bigger problem would be the inevitable outcome of what happened with Instagram; people just post pictures of text to get more reach (and probably also to circumvent Mastodon's stupid character limits).
It's a stupid and arbitrary limitation, but I digress.
It's totally a problem: If I take a look at my Mastodon account from Pixelfed, there are a lot of screenshots shown and some other random images. Which totally does make sense as I do post stuff like that on Mastodon and screenshots totally make sense there. But if you take them to the center of the stage into a photocentric app, that really does look like shit
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No, you as a poster in the Fediverse are selling pizzas and salads. PixelFed is "misrepresenting" you, for lack of a better word, by telling people you only sell pizzas. The thing is, it wasn't doing that before. It was purposefully made to hide useful information that was there before. IMO there should be a sticky "this user has other content which is not images" headbar or something. Only removable as an opt-in per account followed, so that it is not possible for people to say that PF purposefully hid information.
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I think OP has a valid point - it's not about experienced users, but newcomers to the fediverse, who may think they are following an account, when actually they only see a small part of it - there could be some indication of what's missing.
No it doesn't. Just like someone don't expect to see images on tiktok or long form text on x. Nobody would expect to see text only posts on Pixelfed
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This article's core argument seems to be that Pixelfed is violating the ActivityPub protocol by not displaying posts that do not contain images. That's just not true at all. I'm interested to know where the protocol ever has such a requirement.
The principle behind a communication protocol is to create trust that messages are transmitted.
And they have been transmitted. They've been filtered out after transmission, but the protocol did its job.
If a message is not delivered, the sender should be notified.
Perhaps. But that's not in the spec. There's no obligation to notify iirc that a post got filtered out on the target instance.
Even if Pixelfed sent Reject(Note) back for every post without an image, would Mastodon even display that to the user anywhere? Would most users want to see that for every post not containing an image multiplied by every Pixelfed instance it got federated to? I'd personally interpret that as spam.
If that guy was right there wouldn't be defederation and many defederation are not announced
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The problem is not "you ordered a pizza yet are complaining it isn't a salad". The problem is you are selling pizzas and salads, but the middleman is undercutting you on the delivery of the pizzas, leaving your clients with the fake impression you sell only salads and/or provide a bad service.
All that said, from an interface design perspective the current mode is exactly how it should happen. Pixelfed and pretty much everything else are purposefully subset-specific apps. All that's needed is the reminder (as visible as possible) that content you are looking at is incomplete and you can find the more complete version on this or that URL or app. Same principle as if I wanted to eg.: design a "hashtag explorer" for the Fediverse. I'd focus on that instead of the posts (and pictures); but what I can't ethically do is prevent my users from discovering their existence.
But pixelfed is only selling pizza and the cudtomer complains that he didn't find a salad option
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Expecting an photo centric app to display text only post is really ridculous. What's thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app. With the same logic , why not complaining about mastodon only allowing micro blogging short text?
Well, Mastodon will show everything in the feed, no matter if it's a video, a short blog, a long blog, a picture, a podcast, whatever. Mastodon is (primarily) microblogging in terms of output, but an everything platform with a chronological feed in terms of input.
This is where this user seems to get confused - they expect everything on the fediverse to display every type of content, just like Mastodon strives to do. Which is, as you said, ridiculous. If PixelFed was to display audio content and Funkwhale was to display pictures, what would be the point of these services in the first place? If they want everything to be Mastodon, why don't they just stick to Mastodon? Maybe Pixelfed users have no interest in reading their dumb blog posts?
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And if it didn't tell you and you had to find out via an article?
Then you probably should have double checked before signing up to an e-mail server dedicated to "Explore + Share beautiful e-mails without the letter P in them". Pixelfed is extremely open about being a picture platform.
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The consideration you should pay to other software should depend on your power and influence in the network.
If PixelFed was dominant in the fediverse, and other apps did feel the need for a dummy pic workaround, that would clearly be a problem. No client feels the need to do that because PixelFed is not dominant, but if it was, it would be fine to criticise them for not "playing nice" and helping the rest of the ecosystem.
I think there's much more scope to criticise Mastodon for the workarounds other software have to use to be interoperable, than PixelFed, purely because of its power in the network.
We need different apps to experiment and work out what users want. It's totally fine to experiment with different models and ways to view content. Only when you have a lot of influence over the ecosystem should you have extra responsibility.
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It's totally a problem: If I take a look at my Mastodon account from Pixelfed, there are a lot of screenshots shown and some other random images. Which totally does make sense as I do post stuff like that on Mastodon and screenshots totally make sense there. But if you take them to the center of the stage into a photocentric app, that really does look like shit
I guess the consequence of this is that you won't have many followers on Pixelfed.
Occasionally photographers on Mastodon I follow from Pixelfed will post things I don't care much about, but at least I get to see their pictures without having to see their text posts in which I have little to no interest.
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Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures.
Sign me up!
That sounds great. It's like people on the internet don't know how to start a conversation anymore. Can't just say "man I'm struggling with my ADHD lately," they gotta post every decade-old meme from their
personalitymeme folder so people can reply with "haha same"A new social media site doesn't mean new content, it's just a new bucket to fill up with the same shit from every other platform.
(I feel obligated to point out that PugJesus is generally an exception for my meme hatred because he includes descriptions/context for the history memes he posts and I actually get something out of it. Shout out to PJ)
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And if it didn't tell you and you had to find out via an article?
Then this would be pretty shitty.
However, pixelfed is very straightforward about the fact that the focus is on image posts and even if they would not advertise that fact you should realize in less than five minutes of using it that all the posts you see are image posts.
Additionally there are enough apps out there that show all content (I use the default mastodon app to see image posts as well as text posts, etc.). If this is what you want just choose that app.
And if somebody makes an app that only shows text posts then this would be great for people who only want to see text posts. I really don't get the authors problem.
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this is a dumbest opinion out of all the dumb fediverse opinions i've read.
I go to pixelfed to post my art and view other peoples art. that's it. I don't go there to read posts or what's going on in peoples lives. For that I have Akkoma/Mastodon. If I want further interaction and discussion I have Piefed/Lemmy.
this blog post just reeks of "I need my voice to be heard on all the various platforms at the same time and I don't want to go to each individual platform to do it" well I'm sorry cupcake that's now how things work. Why isn't this person complaining about Piefeed posts not showing up on Mastodon or vice versa?
If I sign up to Instagram I don't expect to see facebook posts. Most people understand this concept. People aren't going to go to Pixelfeed and then assume they instantly have access to view Mastodon and Lemmy at the same time.
Yes but being able to do that is a design goal of the fediverse
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Expecting an photo centric app to display text only post is really ridculous. What's thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app. With the same logic , why not complaining about mastodon only allowing micro blogging short text?
What’s thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app.
The problem is the Fediverse could be a lot more than just "decentralized versions of existing apps". Most people now have this app-centric mentality because it was beneficial for Big Tech sharecropping, not because it was better for us.
We shouldn't need different types of apps to see different types of feeds and to sort our data in ways that we want.
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I read the post and understood the problem. Then I read Dan's reply. And he's fixing it. In fact, he's fixing it in the exact way the blog post says it should be fixed, "... but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable."
Here's Dan's reply:
"... I hear the community: you want text-only posts. We are going to build this as an opt-in feature. If you want microblogging, turn it on. If you prefer the classic media-only experience, nothing changes."
Why was this blog post even written then? Now it's seeming to be personal.
We are going to build this as an opt-in feature
I think that the the problem is that it's opt-in, when it should be the default.
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The problem is not "you ordered a pizza yet are complaining it isn't a salad". The problem is you are selling pizzas and salads, but the middleman is undercutting you on the delivery of the pizzas, leaving your clients with the fake impression you sell only salads and/or provide a bad service.
All that said, from an interface design perspective the current mode is exactly how it should happen. Pixelfed and pretty much everything else are purposefully subset-specific apps. All that's needed is the reminder (as visible as possible) that content you are looking at is incomplete and you can find the more complete version on this or that URL or app. Same principle as if I wanted to eg.: design a "hashtag explorer" for the Fediverse. I'd focus on that instead of the posts (and pictures); but what I can't ethically do is prevent my users from discovering their existence.
All that's needed is the reminder (as visible as possible) that content you are looking at is incomplete and you can find the more complete version on this or that URL or app.
That's what Mbin does, it displays a banner on federated user profiles explaining that they may be incomplete, with a link to the same profile on the originating instance.
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Yes but being able to do that is a design goal of the fediverse
Is it?
Because that seems really dumb.Why would any specific niche service want to duplicate the features and functions of every single other niche service? The whole point is to have different experiences and uses, that might be able to (however works for them) interoperate as they see fit.
It's a terrible idea that they should all try to eventually do all the same everything.
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What’s thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app.
The problem is the Fediverse could be a lot more than just "decentralized versions of existing apps". Most people now have this app-centric mentality because it was beneficial for Big Tech sharecropping, not because it was better for us.
We shouldn't need different types of apps to see different types of feeds and to sort our data in ways that we want.
We don't need all fediverse platforms to be a Mastodon clone, we can instead have certain fediverse clients that have a global feed for displaying from all the fediverse and specific feeds for each type of content (videos, texts, images).
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Well, Mastodon will show everything in the feed, no matter if it's a video, a short blog, a long blog, a picture, a podcast, whatever. Mastodon is (primarily) microblogging in terms of output, but an everything platform with a chronological feed in terms of input.
This is where this user seems to get confused - they expect everything on the fediverse to display every type of content, just like Mastodon strives to do. Which is, as you said, ridiculous. If PixelFed was to display audio content and Funkwhale was to display pictures, what would be the point of these services in the first place? If they want everything to be Mastodon, why don't they just stick to Mastodon? Maybe Pixelfed users have no interest in reading their dumb blog posts?
Well, Mastodon will show everything in the feed, no matter if it’s a video, a short blog, a** long blog**, a picture, a podcast, whatever.
Doesn't the long blog simply got truncated to 500 characters and link you to the original content? Which is very not user friendly
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this is a dumbest opinion out of all the dumb fediverse opinions i've read.
I go to pixelfed to post my art and view other peoples art. that's it. I don't go there to read posts or what's going on in peoples lives. For that I have Akkoma/Mastodon. If I want further interaction and discussion I have Piefed/Lemmy.
this blog post just reeks of "I need my voice to be heard on all the various platforms at the same time and I don't want to go to each individual platform to do it" well I'm sorry cupcake that's now how things work. Why isn't this person complaining about Piefeed posts not showing up on Mastodon or vice versa?
If I sign up to Instagram I don't expect to see facebook posts. Most people understand this concept. People aren't going to go to Pixelfeed and then assume they instantly have access to view Mastodon and Lemmy at the same time.
If I sign up to Instagram I don’t expect to see facebook posts. Most people understand this concept.
Actually posts on one can be available on the other. And you can see Instagram posts on Threads, too.
Similarly, I can follow Pixelfed users from Mastodon and see their posts, and they can follow me back and see my Mastodon posts with photo attachments.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Except it's completely gated behind Discord corporate servers, unsearchable outside of Discord, and all ownership lies with... you guessed it, Discord.
But oooh aah Nitro....
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Nextcloud talk has federation?
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Right, but it almost doesn't matter because no-one is actually using matrix in the same way they might use Discord. It just isn't being used socially for hobbies and interests and a part of that is it's design and bugs and tedium getting set up.
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Many people use it as forums.
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Don’t go looking for a 1 to 1 drop in. That mindset won’t work much. Same case wit expecting windows to work the same as windows: they’re just different and have to be learned in their own ways.
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Its buggy, it just doesn't really look like Discord. It is a chore for new users to use. There's no useful community discovery.
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The Stoat development cycle is really, really slow. This is why it's just fallen away.
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In what ways?
