Hello! I drink water.
Good point! I’ve edited my original post to clarify my intention behind bringing up the Patreon.
Overall, the main point I’m trying to make is that the man has a history of chronic project hopping and being hostile to other people who want to contribute to his projects. The goal was not to say that he should be able to fund his entire project via Patreon, but rather that I don’t know he’s the best person to spearhead three fedi platforms at once.
I personally would love to see a fediverse alternative to something like StumbleUpon, which I always found to be quite unique in the realm of social media.
I also think having something like Spotify with social features powered by the fedi would be neat (I realise technically funkwhale is vaguely this, but in execution it really isn’t. It’s federation is pretty basic/not social). Thinking something where you can easily start listening parties, share music to friends to listen to, find song recommendations from friends likes, etc.
I reaaallllly would urge people not to get involved with this kickstarter. He gave similar lists of things he would do with the money he’s been receiving from his backers on his Patreon for years. He never had enough money from his patreon to do that and the claims should not have been made. (I’ve also noticed how on his posts about the kickstarter he goes out of his way to say his work is “entirely self funded”) Instead he’s been jumping from project to project and has been incredibly awful toward folks who want to help improve the stuff he’s neglected.
Take it as a red flag that he’s still the only dev actively working on three incredibly half baked fedi apps, and if you can, look through his mastodon profile to see the kinds of things he says. Check the GitHub issues for Pixelfed and how long some of the most basic ones have been sitting there for.
I genuinely do hope this kickstarter yields something the Patreon I supported does not, as I still run a Pixelfed instance and like it conceptually. But the software itself has been and only gets more broken, and given the way he has privately treated the pixelfed-glitch team all the while publicly acting like he’s been great to and is actively working with them, I really don’t think this dude is acting in especially good faith.
Edit: Took feedback from a reply and clarified the intention behind my point about his Patreon.
There’s an in-dev app called Relatica for iOS that you can get TestFlight access to. It’s quite good!
Absolutely! I’m genuinely hoping for the best because I like the idea behind Pixelfed. 🤞
It’s hard to say, but I’m not anticipating anything myself. Dude seems to be more interested in making flashy branded announcements than developing the thing to a working state.
What I will say is, he’s has for the last several years just under 400 Patreon backers (one of which was me), which was intended to give him funding to bring Pixelfed to a state of relative completion.
In that time he effectively abandoned Pixelfed to work on Loops (which is also in a really rough state and I anticipate will be similarly abandoned for Sup once he runs out of things to ‘announce’ for it), and now that Pixelfed has suddenly gotten this wave of attention, he’s talking about launching a Kickstarter to actually do the thing this time.
He has also been privately very hostile to groups such as the devs of Pixelfed-glitch, which were formed to continue development of Pixelfed, all while publicly stating that he is embracing it with open arms and sharing the development with that team.
He also responds to criticisms of these behaviours with posts like the ones I’ve attached here.
Source: Have been a Pixelfed instance admin for about five years, know several of the pf-glitch devs (who are all mostly server admins), and have been fairly active in the GitHub issues.
Yup. Been following Dan for a while and this has only gotten worse. Problem is, his attitude absolutely informs the way he manages and handles his projects. Even one glance at the issues page for Pixelfed shows that.
I think at some point, a lot of the Fedi will realise that toxicity and hopefully we’ll see fork efforts like Pixelfed-glitch get more support. Because Pixelfed and Loops are good ideas, executed by someone who really doesn’t have the ability to properly execute on them. I don’t anticipate that these current user numbers will stay given the current, quite broken, state of Pixelfed.
Pixelfed still has to fix really basic stuff first. Like pulling changed profile pics from remote instances, federating properly and consistently, not having three different UIs from different stages of development at once, making sure settings do what they’re supposed to do…
Woah shoot me that link that sounds great actually!
I can say they do support MP4! The server owner needs to have it enabled but I’d wager most do :)
The best thing I can think of is probably Pixelfed or even a dedicated Masto profile or something, but neither is really ideal. I’d love to see a federated Imgur emerge- and I wouldn’t be fully surprised if one eventually does.
They work great!! Haven’t had any issues with them on my end. :)
I’d love to see flairs. They were a great way to categorise posts in advance so you knew what you might want to click on.
I’d strongly suggest AtlasOS over Tiny11 once the Atlas team have finished adding 11 support- it’s really solid and does a great job of improving system stability and removing the bloatware/tracking without compromising important features and backend stuff.
I love Mastodon, I was an admin for years and now am a user on another instance and both have been very positive experiences!
I feel that atm PeerTube has too many issues to make it viable and am hoping for a different platform to rise up. My issues with PeerTube largely come down to five things based on when I last used it (a few months ago):
UX/UI: It really suffers in this department. It looks and feels kind of old and unintuitive. This is the least of my complaints but imo it’s one of the worst mainstream fedi UIs.
Over-reliance on plugins vs native features. The devs have taken a strategy of “Feature doesn’t exist? People can make a plugin for it!” for several features, most notably stream live chat. In practice this means even more dependencies and even more components that can break with updates/changes. And since they’re not unilateral across instances it makes everything even more confusing than most fedi sites. IMO plugins should only be for slight changes that affect the local experience rather than major requested features.
Lack of a mobile app. As someone who doesn’t watch YouTube on my PC much but does on my phone, the devs statement that they don’t see mobile as a priority at all and have no plans to develop a mobile app really sucks. What does exist is exclusively for android and imo isn’t a great user experience either. This immediately kills my desire to watch content on a PeerTube instance.
Moderation problems. PeerTube has a serious lack of moderation tools for instances to where federating is largely not recommended due to neo-nazi and alt-right content slipping in even when you’re really trying to keep it out. Most federation features have notices saying that enabling them isn’t recommended. Yikes. When I was running an instance I had a very hard time keeping questionable content at bay, while I don’t have that issue on Masto or Pixelfed or really anything else.
Set up/maintenance can be a nightmare. Trying to set up a PeerTube instance involves a mess of dependencies and the upgrade process is not nearly as smooth as other software. I can say this as someone who has hosted PeerTube and had it break during an update about five or six times.
Wildly, people still think that about working at Apple, for now. I do see that changing slowly too though.