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.
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
Because PixelFed is purposefully hiding the salad option from them. Which is what we are complaining about: it’s lying to our potential customers about us. Note that it didn’t do that before.
Pixelfed never claimed to want to sell or promote salads , it’s a business choice you may say. There’s billions people in the word with different interests you can’t simply please anybody. Mastodon is already able to fetch from pixeled so why would you want everything to be mastodon? Do you have the same complains about peertube not fetching text only content too or instance defederating from each other without notices so basically hiding content from thousands of peoples?
More along the lines of a “pizza finder” service that scours different menus and shows the pizza options at a bunch of places, whether those places exclusively offer pizza, specialize in pizza with some other options, or just offer pizza as one of several options. It would be perfectly reasonable for such a service to only return results related to pizza, without any implicit suggestion that each place it returns only has pizza available.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
Nice ragebait title for some clicks
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.
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.
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.
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).
We don’t need all fediverse platforms to be a Mastodon clone
We don’t need platforms.
A technology platform is the foundation for building and running business applications. The platform allows users to run their applications smoothly without worrying about the technology that supports them. At the same time, it allows technical staff to rapidly extend, enhance, or upgrade application software, increasing the speed of business.
https://www.sap.com/canada/products/technology-platform/what-is-a-technology-platform.html
Pixelfed is definitely a platform . You only heard the term in context of centralized big social media so you think the term has bad connotation
You only heard the term in context of centralized big social media so you think the term has bad connotation
Please, don’t assume things about the people on the other side of a debate. It’s condescending and it robs us all of learning.
I’m not saying that we don’t need platforms because of “bad connotation”. I’m saying it because I have worked on a “social browser” for the fediverse, an application server for using activitypub as a transport mechanism and I know that we can develop an open social web that does not rely on server-centric applications.
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.
No, far from me saying that the clients (apps?) need to look the same. What I am saying is that the differentiation should be happening at the client, not the server.
It’s the thing with Communick. I wish I didn’t have to offer separate instances for each of the services (Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale) but that every member could get one account which then could use as their main fediverse actor, regardless of “frontend” suited them best. The shell should adapt to the user, instead of the user being forced to adapt to the application.
So like a single ActivityPub instance that hosts all the data, but users can have a Pixelfed app, Lemmy app, etc. all connect to that one server and use it to give the experience they specifically provide.
That’s a cool idea. I can see how that would work.
Yeah, the frustrating thing is that https://activitypods.org/ already does the hard part, but we need more developers interested in creating these clients that can work well with it.
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.
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.
Fixed link (at least for Piefed): https://mastodon.social/@dansup/115678527443322224
it makes sense to be honest, the OP article isn’t really convincing
Well that is weird, why did the link get confuzzled…
Not sure either
deleted by creator
Pixelfed doesn’t provide the same service as Mastodon. It’s stupid to think of them as identical services.
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.
