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.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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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.
You can use Pixelfed in the same way you use Imgur (assuming you use Imgur) to post memes or gifs and link them onto Lemmy/Kbin.
And this is where federation and interoperability becomes nice imo, because one doesn't have to use pixelfed and can still get content from Pixelfed in their Mastodon feed, if they want to.
Say someone would like to see the content of just a few Pixelfed users, but doesn't want to create an own Pixelfed account just for that, one can just to follow those specific Pixelfed users with their Mastodon account to see the Pixelfed posts in their Mastodon home timeline.
It's like being able to use your Twitter account to log into Instagram. But the Fediverse version.
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.
This is the way.
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
Yeah i never understood instagram either. I use twitter mainly to follow artists already.
Has anyone been able to successfully follow a pixelfed account from their mastodon account?
I’ve manually searched for a few pixelfed accounts and followed them in mastodon clients but I don’t seem to get any content in my timeline
Works well enough for me
I followed my own pixelfed from my mastodon account and I can see my own posts, including in the timeline
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.
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