Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

On this topic I just want to point out the microblog format with twitter even BEFORE musk bought it had gotten very cold, harsh and toxic.

As a result the most positive thing you can say about people's feelings about microblogging is that they are bored of it (in terms of it having inspiring potential) even if they use it daily themselves and like it.

I don't think that is fair to mastodon or microblogging, it is just how the ships happened to sink as they crashed into the reef.

I say this all to emphasize that it is ok for mastodon not to get hit by massive hypecycles. Mastodon is useful and awesome, if people see it is as boring I say let that be a compliment because that means people are beginning to slowly trust the medium again.

Twitter/musk made people REALLY sad about microblogging and it is going to take time for people to get excited about it again like they do for the 'grams and the 'toks.

First time i have posted on anything resembling insta in 111 weeks

I really wish it were more straightforward to deploy. It would be great to see many more instances popping up.

I wonder how many of those users are the same person with multiple accounts on different platforms.

Great

I know I can Kagi or duckduckgo it or whatever you people are using these days, but what is PixelFed and what's it an alternative to? News aggregators aside, I don't social media so I'm not sure if it's a tiktok or instagram or whatsapp or faceplace.

Pixelfed is really easy to engage with and get a feed started. I think that's let to its popularity growth. I've added mastedon and peertube and neither has made it as easy to onboard.

I still remember the curve with Lemmy. Pixelfed is clearly the easiest to get started with, and then it's just pictures!

Don't wanna throw cold water on what should be a celebration, but are these all distinct active users? I have separate accounts on Lemmy, PixelFed, Mastodon, and Loops--do I still count as one active user, or am I four? If the latter, I think it's plenty likely that others like me have simply gotten used to the first fedi platform they chose and are branching out as they learn about more. Maybe doesn't account for all the growth, but would explain away some of the meteoric rise.

It's quite good, in my opinion. If we had some bridge to lemmy's posts, it would be even better. Also I've checked and if you like or comment a mastodon post from Pixelfed you'll receive the notification, so, it's something🤷‍♂️.

Nothing works on pixelfee for me. Half the photos are just black. It shows an account has a lot of posts, but I don't see anything. Searches being up results but selecting one of those results produces zero results.

How are y'all getting pixelfed to work?

👍

Its' pretty great.

As with the time I joined Mastodon, it takes a couple of weeks to find what you like and build up a good feed, but once you do that, it's useful and fun. I wish it had more curation tools, but I enjoy it.

We just need to explain federation to them

If it brings more diversity, I’m all for it. If it makes it even more super left psycho Echo chamber-y then it will just be annoying.

Is there a way to peruse pixelfed feeds from Lemmy or Mastodon? Or do I have to make yet another account?

It's barely news worthy. Small mostly unknown service gains 400,000 new accounts. Ok. 400k.

Instagram apperently has 4 BILLION accounts, with 143 MILLION monthly users.

400K sounds great, until you compare it to the pie. It went from less then 1% to less than 1%.

Growth is great and all, but since it's January, I'd rather see a retrospective of where they stood on Jan 1st 2024, and where they stood on Jan 1st 2025. With a detailed analysis on all the fluctuations (which at this point I would assume to be nothing but upwards) but also, what caused each event.

But hearing a single month, with an influx of 400k seems like a non-story, and won't be interesting until Jan 2026 when we get the 2025 retrospective. And we put into context that this was when meta decided to go all political, and ban searches for "democrats", and the whole drama with tiktok.

We feel good.

Gonna check this out. Looks interesting thanks.

I find it sort of shocking that you didn't think people who use different types of social media would be swayed by non-micro blogging specific platforms. Nobody wants to join the fediverse because it's the fediverse. They want to join something that's fun and similar to what they're used to.

Micro blogging sucks. I hate it. I've always hated Twitter and none of that hate has come from anything related to who has owned it or their policies. I've just genuinely never felt a desire to communicate with 280 characters (historically 140). The discussion threads are also garbage and all over the place. Why would someone who is used to platforms like Reddit or Instagram want to use Mastodon?

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

Yes, it's done "not be a micro blogging platform".

I'm aware Mastodon doesn't always have the same character limits that Twitter does, but that's apart from the point.