I do not see Pixelfed dominating anything. I have been using the Fediverse for years now, but only recently I applied to a Pixelfed instance. The first instance I applied to - I am still awaiting approval. The second instance I joined did not require approval to join, however, the 1st photo I posted was met with this message; “You (sic) recent post been unlisted. Click here for more info.” (link w/ vague instruction) The 2nd pic I posted made it through. All in all, I am not seeing this as a viable option if it is so hard to use/join/post…
Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?
Submitted 9 hours ago by JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
Comments
lorski@sopuli.xyz 49 minutes ago
ademir@lemmy.eco.br 8 hours ago
Come on, the whole purpose of pixelfed is to be an image federated platform.
If you want something different, use something different.
You ordered a pizza and are complaining it isn’t a salad.
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 6 hours ago
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.
mrdown@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
But pixelfed is only selling pizza and the cudtomer complains that he didn’t find a salad option
Pamasich@kbin.earth 5 hours ago
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.
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one 6 hours ago
PixelFed never claimed to be selling pizzas (images) and salads (text). Just pizzas right?
colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
To me, this is a very strange take. As a Pixelfed user I absolutely don’t expect to see text posts on there. It’s very clearly a platform for sharing images.
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 7 hours ago
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.
n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
wait, Piefed posts don’t show up on Mastodon?
Blaze@piefed.zip 2 hours ago
All posts won’t, a user from the Mastodon instance needs to follow the Piefed user for their posts to show up on the Mastodon instance
baronvonj@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
4am@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Yes but being able to do that is a design goal of the fediverse
Steve@communick.news 5 hours ago
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.
Blaze@piefed.zip 9 hours ago
It make sense for PixelFed to only display pictures, the same way it makes sense for Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to only show posts made on a community.
Using ActivityPub doesn’t mean you can’t have different formats and platforms.
Pamasich@kbin.earth 8 hours ago
the same way it makes sense for Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to only show posts made on a community.
To be fair, that's not how Mbin works. Its communities also capture microblog posts that weren't originally posted to a community, based on the community's configured hashtags.
Blaze@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
That’s nice of Mbin, I usually recommend it to people looking to have the two formats in one, but the majority of the Threadiverse users seem to prefer Lemmy or Mbin
flamingos@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
Can’t wait for the follow up post decrying PeerTube for only allowing videos, or Bookwrym for only allowing book reviews. Just because it’s ActivityPub doesn’t mean it has to be a Twitter timeline.
Once a major actor in a decentralised network starts to mess with the protocol, there are only two possible output: either that actor lose steam or that actor becomes dominant enough to impose its own vision of the protocol. In fact, there’s a third option: the whole protocol becomes irrelevant because nobody trust it anymore.
You mean like Mastodon? Where’s the angry diatribe about Mastodon not allowing posts to have more than 4 pictures despite other platforms allowing more (Pixelfed allows up to 20 for example)?
missingno@fedia.io 3 hours ago
I don't think every Fediverse platform needs to support every type of post, and I especially don't think it's an impending catastrophe if they don't. In fact I think it's better to specialize. Even though Mbin supports microblogging, I prefer using this account solely for threads and a separate Pleroma account for microblogging.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
the fediverse is just a collection of content across multiple sites; activitypub items can be one of many types. how is limiting the display of fediverse content on an app to just image types “being against the fediverse”?
why would i want to see text posts when i join a photo sharing app?
n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
I sure do like this picture: picture of fediverse mascots sitting on a branch on a tree
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 hours ago
You sly dog you made me open my network tab to see if there actually was an image there! (there is, it was just being blocked because of my uBO setting for fetching remotes).
INeedMana@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse
(…)
This is a grave abuse of the protocol: messages are silently dropped. It stands against everything the Fediverse is trying to do: allow users to communicate. My experience with open protocols allows me to say that it is a critical problem and that it cannot be tolerated. Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter “P”?Oh, the drama. I think this is a wrong take. The point of ActivityPub is not that we all see everything. Is so the servers can exchange activities. But whether it makes sense to put it in our inboxes or not, depends on what particular application is supposed to do. If using AP would require the application to show everything, what would be the differences between the apps?
I use Threadiverse because I prefer a bit more structured content than what’s happening on Mastodon. While I would love to be able to follow the few accounts and tags on Mastodon that interest me, the fact that I don’t see all that traffic is not an abuse of the protocol
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, since
Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram
Then what Pixelfed does is also correct, Instagram also does not show the whole wall from Facebook. Only the pictures, right?
Jerry@feddit.online 7 hours ago
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.
rglullis@communick.news 5 hours ago
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.
optissima@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
Seems like the article was written first maybe?
Pamasich@kbin.earth 8 hours ago
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.
mrdown@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
If that guy was right there wouldn’t be defederation and many defederation are not announced
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
The writing in this article it absolutely terrible. It needs some serious clean-up before the message isn’t impaired by the medium.
lorski@sopuli.xyz 47 minutes ago
I feel it is english as 2nd language or a poor translation. It still gets the point across.
onnekas@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter “P”?
Yes, if the mail provider is advertising the fact that they are dropping everything containing “P” AND if I’m currently not in the mood to read anything containing “P” AND if there are enough good alternative mail providers that do show me things containing “P”.
What a weird take.
optissima@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
And if it didn’t tell you and you had to find out via an article?
aasatru@kbin.earth 6 hours ago
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.
onnekas@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
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.
realitista@lemmus.org 2 hours ago
It’s an interesting conversation, but I don’t see a problem in grafting a photo-only community over activitypub.
It beats the alternative of having Instagram remain the dominant player. I mean if you only want to see pictures, you won’t sign up for a service like Mastodon that will serve you text instead.
And I don’t see any need to add a default picture to every post just to get to these people. Let them see their photos if that’s what they want.
It’s still more users for the fediverse and I don’t really see a better way to implement this. Let people enjoy themselves on the fediverse in the way they see fit.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
I remember reading that Loops (? - may be wrong about which one) does the same thing, only displaying statuses with videos in them. I have not, so far, seen anyone claim that that is a bad thing, and frankly don’t agree that it is. If we can’t do that, then we can never have specialized platforms built on ActivityPub, e.g. platforms only for videos or for photos, etc., and that would severely limit what we can do with it.
Nemo@slrpnk.net 7 hours ago
Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures.
Sign me up!
julian@activitypub.space 4 hours ago
You jest, but I'm pretty sure someone out there made a cli interface for AP.
Nemo@slrpnk.net 2 hours ago
I am very much not jesting.
glimse@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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)
lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 hours ago
so, an old style BBS?
I’d be all in.
mrdown@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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?
aasatru@kbin.earth 6 hours ago
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?
mrdown@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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
rglullis@communick.news 5 hours ago
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.
mrdown@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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).
Steve@communick.news 5 hours ago
I think you might be conflating two things. Right now the Fediverse largely looks like you just described. It’s in it’s infancy, trying to copy what it sees around it. Eventually it’ll become a rebellious teen and forge it’s on seperate identity. That’s inevitable. I wouldn’t worry about it.
It’s a very different thing though, saying all the apps need to integrate all the features and experience of every other app, so they’re all largely the same and there’s never a need to use more than one. That sounds like a terrible idea.
Nanook@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Nice ragebait title for some views
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 7 hours ago
I can understand the reservation against an AP-Platform not making clear that they display only a subset of messages, but not against the practice by itself. After all, it’s a platform specifically for showing images. A notification when following a non-pixelfed account that only image posts will be shown would do the trick too, but implementing the option to view text posts gives the user more agency, which is normally the best path as long as it doesn’t mess with usability.
korendian@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Does this person not understand how media specific sites work? If you want a mixed media website, there are plenty out there on the fediverse. Saying every site should host every media type gives users less options, not more.
artyom@piefed.social 6 hours ago
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.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 6 hours ago
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
aasatru@kbin.earth 6 hours ago
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.
benjhm@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
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.
mrdown@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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
ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
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.
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 7 hours ago
The thought behind the post is worthwhile to ponder and discuss.
Personally, I don’t think it’s as dire as the text makes it seem. The speculation that a steadfast refusal of showing text only on PF might lead the AP protocol guardians to include a dummy pic in every post seems to me to be in the “possible but outlandish” category.
If the premise of AP was that every user should be able to see everything everywhere then defederating from certain instances shouldn’t be possible. But that’s a feature, not a bug.
The tree of the fediverse is big and nobody needs to saw off any branches. A picture only branch can sit next to a hypothetical text only one. I can see an argument that newbies to those particular branches could be more explicitly made aware of the filtering they will experience. While I was reading the text about the users who thought they saw everything from Mastodon on PF, my first thought was: this strains credulity. But then again, users are dumb. I hadn’t realized for a while that shared posts don’t show up in my PF feed on the app either.
I don’t think anybody could become too big for their breeches on the fediverse because the fediverse is in no position to challenge the incumbent corporate platforms. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here and on Mastodon (and on PF). But if you come from those polished centrally organized platforms and you’re not willing to invest at least a little bit of time into learning how federating works (also refer to users are dumb above), you’ll already be disappointed and put off before you realize you now need to also become your own algorithm. The threat scenario that PF could become so big that it can dictate protocol also presupposes that AP is the protocol that will endure forever. And with AT it already has a competitor waiting in the wings. As I said up top, the thought about how one dominating branch could damage the whole tree is worthwhile. But in a dramatic shift from this metaphor: we are in no position to have to cross this bridge any time soon.
Another reason why PF won’t be getting out the chainsaw is its usability. It’s only great for looking at pictures. It’s terrible for having discussions about them unless you only use the website. I’m using the Android app and it’s not great. Features came and went. The UI leaves a lot to be desired for me. It currently feels a bit abandoned because Dansup is more preoccupied with challenging TikTok. I still like PF because I go there just to look at pictures. I go to Mastodon for memes and dry remarks. And I don’t feel like I’m breaking the protocol.
This image may be a bit wonky but convenience stores don’t go out of business just because 24h supercenters exist. They both exchange ice cream for money but one of them has a bigger selection of flavors. PF is 7/11, Mastodon is Walmart.
fdrc_lm@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 minutes ago
That the fact you can’t see boosts/reposts on Pixelfed.social is way worse than that and yet nobody seems to care