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Comment by commoner | Hacker News Reader

The open source federated equivalent to Instagram is Pixelfed:

There's an Android app for it called PixelDroid: https://gitlab.shinice.net/pixeldroid/PixelDroid

Pixelfed is the kind of project I'm talking about. It's a great start of a project that needs a lot more work to become usable as a serious photography platform. I wish more people would put their effort into improving projects like Pixelfed rather than building front ends for Instagram that get shut down.

Here's something I never seem to get a clear picture of, with these federated options. The typical explanation that makes the concept easy to understand is that federated services are "like email, we can have different providers, e.g. you might have a gmail account and I might have a yahoo or outlook address, and we'd still be able to communicate".

I think that's a very good way to put it, but the issue is that with email providers most users have an account in a company that is well established and its future continuity is not in doubt, at least in a span of months or couple years. And even if yahoo happened to close their email service, there are good software solutions that are mature and can be easily found and used to move your emails from one IMAP address to another.

Now, with federated options, I see all these funny looking domaim names, which I'm sorry but to me they scream "I'll be gone by next week (or month or year)". In general, apart from the most prominent federated instances -those that typically belong to the creators or are endorsed by them-, there is a lot of small instances that don't transmit a lot of confidence in their long-term existence.

And I get it, these are hosted mostly by users of the network. But the thing is that I'm a user, not a sysadmin. I have enough work already at work, and for this kind of use I'd really like to not worry about hosting a service by my own (especially after seeing this list of requisites! [0]) or that the instance I chose 6 months ago is now disappearing without notice. Are any fediverse implementations working on this issue, such like promoting an instance rating / trust system, or something like that? Apart from, of course, tooling to make migration a one click process.

[0]: https://docs.pixelfed.org/running-pixelfed/prerequisites.htm...

Most fediverse services have a website that provides a list of instances with statistics. The site is usually named "join" + the name of the service. For Pixelfed, the list of instances is at joinpixelfed.org and it's in beta:

https://beta.joinpixelfed.org

That list omits the largest instance (https://pixelfed.social).

There are also third-party websites that provide statistics on fediverse nodes. The-Federation.info has a list for Pixelfed:

https://the-federation.info/pixelfed

If you want to choose an instance that will last, one of the most popular instances is usually a safe bet. On the other hand, if you are mainly interested in certain topics or if you want to interact with users from a certain region, some smaller instances may have like-minded communities that would be more appealing to you.

Nice, thanks. I guess I'llhave to look for a middle ground :-)

Maybe the ecosystem is missing more instances that allow using a custom domain, something that according to other commenter is possible

I just realized an important difference between e-mail addresses and "fediverse handle is like an e-mail address": with e-mail, I can use my own domain to ensure the address outlives any single company, but that doesn't mean I have to run my own server. I can delegate e-mail handling to third parties, and swap them out at any time, and nobody's the wiser.

Meanwhile, it seems (based on what I know right now) that Fediverse handles are owned by the servers, not by users. I can't make me@mydomain username and delegate its handling to one of the existing instances, I must run my own node.

(Or maybe I'm wrong and it works just like e-mail. I just never saw it used this way.)

Signing up for an account on someone else's instance (pixelfed.social, mastodon.social, etc.) is like signing up for an email address through someone else's email service provider (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.). @pixelfed.social accounts are exclusive to pixelfed.social, just as @gmail.com addresses are exclusive to Gmail. If you want to change instances or providers, you must also change your account's username or address.

To have an email address that remains the same when you change email service providers, you need your own domain and a provider that supports custom domains. You can also have a fediverse account on your own domain that works in the same way without self-hosting, since there are also hosting providers for some fediverse services that support custom domains. Here are a few that I found:

Spacebear (Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mastodon): https://app.spacebear.ee

Masto.host (Mastodon): https://masto.host

Hostdon (Pleroma, Mastodon): https://hostdon.jp (in Japanese)

The main difference is that joining someone else's fediverse instance lets other users in the instance discover what you are posting more easily when they are not subscribed to you. For email, it doesn't matter whether your email address is on Gmail or your personal domain, since all messages are private.

Also, for email, if I use or recommend usage of any provider, as long as it supports IMAP (i.e. mostly all), it is almost trivial to do (or help others do) a migration of emails to a new provider, if the need arises.

Not so with federated services. I see there are some efforts, some solutions, but in general it looks like an afterthought.

Seems really cool, I'm going to spin up an instance. Their homepage is a bit odd though; very low density and you have to scroll alllll the way down to find the "Run your own server, or join one" links.

Yikes, so much for that; getting it running is like building a model airplane: https://docs.pixelfed.org/running-pixelfed/prerequisites.htm...

The Pixelfed repo includes a Docker Compose file that is easier to set up:

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/blob/dev/docker-compose...

Another option is to set up Yunohost (free) or Cloudron (freemium), both of which support Pixelfed and a variety of self-hosted services:

https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/pixelfed_ynh

https://www.cloudron.io/store/org.pixelfed.cloudronapp.html

I’ve been thinking of looking for this for quite some time, thanks for sharing. I miss Instagram all the time, but the experience got worse every year. Too many ads, too much wandering from the photo-first product I fell in love with, too much Facebook.

How does Pixelfed makes money?

Looks like Patreon if you read the web site. And Liberapay, I guess. It’s an open source “host your own” software, I don’t think they are trying to monetize beyond paying a living wage for the developer.

It is not a company, but a federated network – anyone can run their own server and interact with the all other nodes (much like email). The software is open source and is a community effort, although the lead developer got a grant [1] that allows him to spend time to improve the project over time.

1: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed#pixelfed-sponsors

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