This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
good to know because honestly after Meta forcing a clone of my Insta account onto Threads (which I'll never use), really considering finally cutting ties with all mainstream social media and deleting my Insta in favor of Pixelfed. and just going total fediverse.
Me too. I need to figure out how streaming works on Peertube.
Streaming is more difficult since you have to create a viewership from basically nothing, while sites like Twitch, Kick, and Youtube have a massive userbase for streaming content. You can join a peertube instance but there seems to be little content and few users. Owncast is ok, basically more like hosting your own Twitch channel, but again you would need to byo userbase. You can use mastodon/kbin/lemmy to build up a following. Not sure if anyone has made a stable income from these services though.
Couple resources for people to look-up:
https://directory.owncast.online/
https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
Yeah, video hosting is going to be the tough one. It's very costly for volunteers.
And I'd think much more likely to be subject to copyright claims and/or child porn crap. it's bittorrent type sharing so it opens up to a world of legal pain it would seem. Really hard for a volunteer setup to deal with that.
I guess you'll just have to resign yourselves to never seeing my beautiful, snake-framed face.
This could be a plus.
I dont understand what pixelfed brings that mastodon doesnt already
some people like a image focused experience. That's why Instagram and Twitter both exist despite having basically the same feature set.
Even more importantly, open standards need multiple implementations to thrive. Kbin and lemmy offer nearly the same feature set too, but having more than one implementation makes the fediverse more healthy
I’ve heard the name Pixelfed before, but I don’t know what it is, or why the ability to sign in with Mastodon is important.
Pixelfed is a federated photo sharing platform similar to instagram, signing in with Mastodon lets you carry over who you're following on Mastodon.
So I wouldn't say it's too important, but I thought it belonged here.
You’re totally right; it does belong here. It’s nice to see Mastadon getting more acceptance!
I think it's also worth mentioning here that, since both pixelfed and mastodon belong to the fediverse, you can follow pixelfed users from mastodon and vice versa and see each others posts. :)
That's why the whole carrying over the people you follow stuff is a thing.
Yeah. Even though I’ll probably never use Pixelfed (I don’t use Instagram, either, or anything like it) I still acknowledge that’s a pretty cool feature.
is this a good or bad idea?
It's an okay idea really, it has its pros and cons. It can get complicated if someone signs in with Mastodon and then moves to a different Mastodon instance, and there's also the question of what happens if that Mastodon account gets banned (assuming an unjust ban).
Really just the same issues as a sign in with Google button, minus the privacy issue. Very convenient, but not without its potential issues
I sort of just assumed you could view PixelFed content with a Mastodon account anyway? Would this effectively create a second identical account?
You can view Pixelfed from Mastodon, but the interface of Mastodon is more focused on text microblogging than on image sharing. By federating the logins they are kind-of making an SSO of sorts, so now you can use the full pixelfed interface but your suscriptions and history stay on your Mastodon instance and just federate over to the pixelfed instance you are login into.
That's how people new to the fediverse were expeting it to work (myself included when I joined last year), so it's nice to see it starting to shift that way.
Right, the ability to port your social graph with you is the benefit here.
Don't believe that's how it works. It's not SSO (which would be AWESOME). That will create an actual local account on other servers. This is still your mastodon account 'viewing' a pixelfed account via the ActivityPub protocol. It's just the 'view' that's different for different services (very broad definition). Viewing a pixelfed account/profile via a pixelfed instance shows you a photo gallery that has text with each photo (not alt text). Viewing that same pixelfed account from a mastodon account, you'd see a series of toots/posts text that happen to mostly have pictures. The reverse view of pixelfed looking at a Mastodon account, not sure but I'd guess just a mostly empty photo gallery with text associated?
Yeah, it's not SSO, that's why I wrote "of sorts", but the post is precisely of how Pixelfed will now allow Mastodon users to log into a Pixelfed instance with their Mastodon account, meaning they will not see the current view of pixelfed as looked from a Mastodon interface but should look as if the user had a pixelfed account, since they are using the pixelfed interface.
It's not released yet, so I have not tested it, but hopefully soon.