Show HN: Pixelfed.club – Aggregator for Pixelfed Posts | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pixelfed.club – Aggregator for Pixelfed Posts

pixelfed.club

59 pointssnisarenko10 comments

Hi HN,

I built pixelfed.club to reduce friction between people finding out about pixelfed (and other fediverses) and being able to see whats happening on those Fediverses.

Any feedback is welcome.

I've also built a similar aggregator for Mastodon, you can check it out here:

https://mastodonia.club

(Warning: Some NSFW posts might show up, I do my best to filter them out)

Looks pretty good! The Pixelfed aggregator seems more useful than the Mastodon aggregator to me, because most of the Mastodon posts are in languages I can't read, but I can look at all of the pretty Pixelfed pictures no matter the language ;-)

Are you going to release the source code?

> The Pixelfed aggregator seems more useful than the Mastodon aggregator to me, because most of the Mastodon posts are in languages I can't read,

Yep, that's a good point. The next feature I am planning for mastodonia is to filter by language

> Are you going to release the source code?

Good question. Not sure yet. I am trying to figure out if commercialization is a good path for fediverse related projects. I think fediverse community is pretty anti VC and profit. On the one hand I kind of agree with them - VC money eventually ruins all community/social related startups (ex: digg, reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram etc). It's a cycle that's been repeating for about 20 years (maybe the market is about to realize it and change direction, hence the fediverse). On the other hand you can't maintain fediverse instances on charity alone. I think a good trade-off are non-profit corp structure.

I think we can learn a lot from high quality communities that have survived and remained high signal in the past 20 years.

Some examples:

Hackernews: Subsidized by YCombinator, to maintain an funnel of companies for their seed fund.

https://lobste.rs - Hosting seems to be based on benevolent charity from prgmr.com

somethingawful.com - a forum thats been around for a while and charges $10 to join.

My long term thoughts on aggregators for fediverses:

I think aggregation/curation sites (like pixelfed.club) can be a decentralized complement to the fediverse. The fediverse generates the content. Aggregators, can curate the content for specific topics and help new users discover content. Anyone can start a fediverse instance, and anyone can start a aggregation/curation instance.

> I think a good trade-off are non-profit corp structure.

Really believe in this model, and hope it is followed more often. And it could also be a coop, which aligns quite well with community-building.

A decentralized content ecosystem develops, content tracking and discoverability become a problem, a bunch of aggregators emerge, eventually one or few dominate and become the default destination for a critical mass of the users, decide they might as well become a platform, the ecosystem is no longer decentralized. Rinse and repeat.

I agree this scenario could happen. That's certainly been the cycle.

But if we go back to thinking about this problem from first principles [1], I think certain things have changed.

1. Hosting a complex app in the "cloud" has become significantly cheaper, and easier

2. Centralized services have network effects because you can't find your "connections" on other services. That's not true with federation. Even though gmail is the most popular provider of email, there are still other providers that are alive and well today. In fact there has been some cultural movement of moving from gmail to paid & private email providers, because they are so cheap nowadays.

3. In federated systems, its relatively "easy" to move to another provider. Although much more work needs to be done to improve migration in fediverse.

4. De-centralization doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. What is the minimal "centralized", and cheap bootstrapping service for a federated system ? Answer: A domain name + static site with some links to "trusted" providers. Cost: $10 a year for domain + static hosting (pretty much zero dollars) ~ approximately $1 dollar per month

5. There has been some egregious censorship happening by centralized social providers (a total 180 to how early internet culture was). It's their right to do it as private companies, but that's also what motivated some people to move to the fediverse.

[1] https://fs.blog/2018/04/first-principles/

Very nice to see this aggregator! PixelFed [0] is a great webapp and development of the project is progressing at a fine pace (thanks @dansup). New great features continuously announced on their Mastodon account: https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed

[0] https://pixelfed.org

Thanks for the kind words.

Great idea. My one criticism is that there seems to be some resizing of images taking place which significantly reduces the quality.

So there are 2 things that are happening. The image I ingest for the aggregator is the preview image (slightly lower quality than the original image). I also resize the image (using CSS) on the site to have higher content density.

You can see the original quality image by clicking on the post. It will take you to the actual post on the actual pixelfed instance.

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