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2026-01-28 08:48:24

oliver@microhive.me

Very interesting post. I myself also have several #ActivityPub channels for different purposes.
I'm very well connected with people through #Snac and #Hubzilla, but #Pixelfed and #Peertube are really just content ‘distributors’.
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment
"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected."

2026-01-28 12:55:46

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Oliver ⚡ Truth be told, Pixelfed is not and has never been meant to be anyone's one and only Fediverse daily driver. It's specialising in image sharing.

However, it's still either meant or made out to be an Instagram clone. And Instagram pretty much is the one and only all-purpose social media daily driver for most of its users, for almost the entire Millennial generation. It was created as an image-sharing platform, and it's being used as a social network, just like the Zoomers use TikTok as a social network.

Thus, all those former Instagram users who were lured to Pixelfed by rather clueless Mastodon users use Pixelfed as their all-purpose Fediverse daily driver, probably also because they fail to wrap their minds around requiring multiple accounts and multiple logins for multiple Fediverse server applications.

This idea of only requiring one Pixelfed account to do pretty much everything in the Fediverse clashes hard with Daniel's idea of what Pixelfed is and shall be. Then again, the former idea was probably also fostered by Mastodon users who use Mastodon for pretty much everything in the Fediverse, regardless of whether Mastodon is fit for it or not.

And just like many Mastodon and Pixelfed users don't want to have more than one Fediverse login, many Mastodon and Pixelfed users don't want to move someplace that's more of a jack-of-all-trades, or they simply don't know that such places exist.

Then again, the really fully-featured jacks-of-all-trades in the Fediverse are Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. But they're also at the opposite end of friendliness towards converts from corporate silos. They have steep learning curves; Hubzilla, the most powerful of them, has the steepest. It's easier to adapt from Twitter to Mastodon than it is to adapt from Mastodon to Forte.

Also, other than (streams) and Forte being totally obscure, obstacles in joining them are also that (streams) barely has any public servers, and these servers are intentionally being kept away from server listings like Fediverse Observer and FediDB. And Forte doesn't have any public servers, full stop, only personal, single-user servers.

CC: @ploum

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Pixelfed #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte