This morning I checked in on Pixelfed, the ActivityPub-powered Instagram alternative. I had created a profile on an instance in 2021 and I check in from time-to-time to see how it is coming along. All told, the experience is fair. But I’m far more excited by how well it is connecting to other platforms.
An iOS client app has been in TestFlight (which is Apple’s platform for sharing beta versions of your app to a wider audience for feedback) for a fairly long time. It is pretty clearly a web view shoved into an iOS app and the experience is exactly what you’d imagine that to be. Odd refreshes, a little jittery at times.
Update! Just a few hours after I published this post, the iOS app was made publicly available.
That being said, I don’t care. The entire point of Pixelfed is that it is federated, open source, and it isn’t owned by a company driven by ad sales. And when you’re browsing around on Pixelfed you can hardly tell if the photos you’re viewing are from the Pixelfed instance you’re on, a different instance, or even from an instance of Mastodon. It is truly great to view photos from all over the fediverse in this way. It almost makes me with Ivory had an Instagram-mode when viewing the fediverse.
I only briefly mentioned Pixelfed in my late-2023 prediction post about ActivityPub crossing the chasm in 2024. I plan on revisit that post and see how things played out – but Pixelfed seems to have matured enough to be well positioned as an alternative to Instagram as people decide to leave that network for another one.
One thing is definitely in low supply there from what I’ve seen; good photography. It seems an awful lot of people logged in, uploaded a photo or two, and left. And many of the “popular” accounts have follower counts in the single hundreds. So the network has some growth to do yet. Also, because you can view Mastodon profiles from within Pixelfed’s Instagram-like interface, it makes it seem like lower quality photos are being shared there than actually are.
For instance, look at my Mastodon profile from within Pixelfed. This isn’t my Pixelfed profile. It is my Mastodon profile as viewed from within Pixelfed. And you can follow it from within Pixelfed. Which I think is a strength not a weakness. However, the random images I share via Mastodon do not look very nice in a grid like that. I wouldn’t blame someone looking at this profile and questioning why I put “photographer” in my bio.
As I browse around Pixelfed this morning I think I’m stumbling into a fair number of profiles that have no idea they are being viewed in an interface like Pixelfed. I don’t know that Pixelfed can or should do anything about this issue. But you might see the same thing if you give it a try.
One thing that I can do about this issue, perhaps to help out some, is to upload better photos to my Pixelfed profile from time-to-time. And ask you to follow it there. Another thing I can do is donate to support its continued improvement.
I’ve said this a few times so I’m sorry for repeating myself; the social web is a mess right now. And in the best way possible. So much new work is flying around, new ideas are being attempted, and people are browsing each one to see which they prefer. Except this time, many of the platforms are working hard at being able to talk to one another so that (hopefully) it will matter far less where we all end up. We’ll all be able to follow one another from the platforms of our choice, using the apps we like the best, and it will all just work.
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