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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Pixelfed since I discovered it after Elon bought Twitter. It's helped me get back into photography and I post daily. Of course the userbase is tiny compared to Insta, but I don't care.

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I'd rather grown a small but sincerely interested community around my work, than a large, mostly indifferent one.

When I was still active on DeviantArt regularly, but before I got Gallery Director status (2004-2008 ish) I sold little prints, but consistently. After GD, I overall sold about double, but the interaction was like an EKG, and full of noise and stupid complaints and random stats-whoring from commenters. It felt like too much of a rollercoaster managing whatever turdstorm may or may not arise.

I'm still trying to bootstrap a regular pace with PF, as I'm still a very active IG user, but I may just test out if the Import function can handle JSON file with over 10K posts...

Yeah, I joke with my daughters that I have EIGHT followers, and my financial windfall is just around the corner.

I used to do quite a bit of photog and even majored in visarts, but lost interest until recently. Nice to have something simple like daily posting reinvigorate an old interest. It's like writers who have to write every day. After a while you get decent at it.

I started posting my art online 20 years ago with DeviantArt and my original blogging efforts, but it was predicated on the fact that I had an art practice for my own edification, so the online part just became an adjunct aspect. I was "gonna art" regardless, so why not syndicate what that is, regardless of what it generates.

Keeping that attitude has been healthy in terms of what I produce, but I do find that I would prefer to be using a service that allows for some actual community elements, which DevArt has allowed to go fallow, and other sites never quite had (e.g. Society6) but at least have good artist services (e.g. prints)

Just curious then...why use it? Do you take photos for yourself, or do you like to do it for a small audience? And if the audience on it is small, and your potential audience on IG is small, why not just use IG where you have a chance of getting a bigger audience?

I have a couple of goals where Pixelfed serves me well. I want to improve my photography, as well as get outside (away from all my screens) more. So I've encouraged my OCD/hyper-fixation to post daily. To improve something, I think you need to have criticism of some type. I measure that in terms of likes or reposts on pixelfed. It's not perfect, but it is some validation. Sometimes people post comments, but that's unusual.

I prefer Pixelfed since I don't want to feed the Meta beast.

Probably many will not like that IG/Meta own our pictures and do devious things with it, line using to train AIs, etc

fun hobby photography is a reason I've been considering a Pixelfed instance. I like that idea.

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