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2025-07-16 20:08:54

midtsveen@social.linux.pizza

I know a lot of people aren’t happy with pixelfed.social and its moderator. I’m too lazy to switch to another site, so I just post there whenever I feel like it.

You can follow me here: @midtsveen@pixelfed.social

#Pixelfed #Dansup #Fediverse

2025-07-16 20:31:23

Rob

rob@skol.social

@midtsveen

What's the controversy with pixelfed.social?

2025-07-16 20:43:16

Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

midtsveen@social.linux.pizza

@rob

https://dansup-open-letter.github.io/appendix

https://dansup-open-letter.github.io

https://mastodon.social/@katzenberger@mastodon.de/114094566604374808

2025-07-16 21:07:03

Rob

rob@skol.social

@midtsveen

Do you think the Fediverse better off with or without Pixelfed.social? With or without Dan and developers like Dan?

2025-07-16 21:09:59

Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

midtsveen@social.linux.pizza

@rob Read the open letter I guess, the appendix got me reconsidering my time on #Pixelfed!

"We believe dansup has done a lot of good for the fediverse as an ecosystem. We acknowledge the large userbase of Pixelfed, a project spearheaded and maintained by dansup; we additionally acknowledge the work that he has done championing the fediverse and putting time and effort into developing tools and platforms for it."

"However, we remain confident that dansup's actions are unacceptable behaviour coming from a project maintainer, especially considering his position of power relative to his peers, and that he should rethink this behaviour."

As an #ActuallyAutistic person, I agree with this!

2025-07-16 21:31:14

Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

midtsveen@social.linux.pizza

@rob Look, the facts aren’t up for debate: Pixelfed.social is only as strong as the trust people have in its leadership and moderation. The open letter and its appendix aren’t just drama, they’re detailed, public documentation from real users and developers in the Fediverse, showing exactly where dansup and his admins have failed at basic community standards. Sure, he’s done a lot for the platform, and no one’s denying that. The Fediverse has always welcomed innovation and passionate developers.

“We believe dansup has done a lot of good for the fediverse… However, we remain confident that dansup’s actions are unacceptable behaviour coming from a project maintainer, especially considering his position of power relative to his peers, and that he should rethink this behaviour.”

This isn’t about whether the Fediverse is “better with or without” Pixelfed or even Dan himself. It’s about standards. If the people in charge can’t follow the basic community guidelines or handle criticism without lashing out, or if they use their power to silence and marginalize others, that’s not a healthy project, no matter how many users it has.

Nobody is “banning” Pixelfed.social. If someone wants to stay or use it, they can. But that doesn’t change the facts raised in the letter, or the damage that comes when a project leader abuses their position. That’s why so many are reconsidering their participation, including me.

If you’re asking, “Is the Fediverse ‘better off’ with or without Dan?” it misses the point: no one should get a pass for this kind of behavior just because they're talented or started something popular. If the price of “innovation” is constant drama and disregard for accountability, then that’s not a price the community should have to pay.

I’m staying for now (lazy, remember?), but let’s not pretend who runs the project doesn’t matter, or that good code excuses bad conduct.

#Pixelfed #Fediverse

2025-07-16 21:45:35

Erik L. Midtsveen 🏴🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸

midtsveen@social.linux.pizza

@rob Authoritarianism thrives even today but most people cannot see it happening around them especially in digital spaces like the Fediverse. Everywhere digital technologies are used to control debate and silence critics. The trick is always the same: those in power say it is for safety or order but what it really does is limit dissent and hand more control over to the few. Platforms like Pixelfed are not immune. When one person or a closed developer circle can decide what is allowed and who gets thrown out it is just another version of old authoritarianism, just dressed up with new code and branding.

People celebrate decentralization but then look away when a project lead acts like a digital boss, policing where it suits him and ignoring the voices that do not fit. Users accept the leader’s authority as if there is no alternative. Many convince themselves this is normal. It is not.

The lesson is simple: digital tools that promise community can become tools of control just as fast as any authority if the people using them stop questioning and start accepting. That is why Pixelfed and dansup are worth pushing back against. Any system where one person tells everyone how things must work turns the digital world into just another place to be ruled over, not to be free.

#Pixelfed #Fediverse

2025-07-18 11:52:19

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Erik L. Midtsveen🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @Rob One main issue here is that the owner of the whole project is also the owner of the lighthouse instance. And the lighthouse instance is the biggest instance by far because it's the only instance that many newbies even know until well after they've joined.

We've seen that often enough in the Fediverse. But on Pixelfed, it seems the most extreme.

mastodon.social is so big that it's home of 22% of all active users of the whole Fediverse. But it has never outnumbered all other instances combined for as long as Mastodon actually mattered because one of Mastodon's early target audiences were geeks capable of running their own servers. In fact, mastodon.social hasn't even always been the biggest. Thus, it wouldn't be worth the effort for Gargron and the devs to assume control over mastodon.social since they've got so much competition already.

I remember when Lemmy really took off. That was when Reddit was enshittified by asking tens of millions of dollars for its client API, killing off all unofficial frontends. Just like just about all Twitter refugees fled to mastodon.social, just about all Lemmy refugees fled to lemmy.ml.

However, lemmy.ml is owned, operated and controlled by the devs. The devs are completely unabashed tankies, one being a Stalinist, one being a Maoist. ".ml" doesn't stand for Mali, it stands for Marxism-Leninism or rather МДЯ☭ЇꙄМ-LЭИЇИЇꙄМ. In fact, they have another instance: lemmygrad.ml.

The result was that Lemmy, as a whole, gained the reputation of being a tankie network.

Fortunately, however, Reddit was (and still is) so full of geeks that not exactly few freshly-converted Lemmings fired up their own public instances as alternatives.

This appears to be very different on Pixelfed. Who's Pixelfed's target audience? For one, artists. Especially photographers. Besides, Instagram refugees. Generally, the vast majority of people who daily-drive Pixelfed aren't geeks. In fact, many of them may never have laid hands on an actual computer in their lives and only ever have used phones as their main digital end-user devices.

Thus, it's highly unlikely that disgruntled Pixelfed users rent Web space (or even set up a server at home) and launch their own Pixelfed instance. This leads to a lack of (known) alternatives to pixelfed.social. And I guess there are not exactly few Pixelfed users for whom pixelfed.social is Pixelfed. On top of all this, I don't know whether it's possible to move to another Pixelfed instance and take your stuff with you.

And so we have a situation in which confronting dansup for how he's running pixelfed.social is much more feasible than packing your things and moving elsewhere.

By the way, Loops' situation should give you to think. As far as I know, loops.video is still the only instance, and it's owned and controlled by dansup. Loops actually started out closed-source. And it seems not too easy to set up your own Loops instance, seeing as videos tend to take up tons of storage, and Loops lacks PeerTube's peer-to-peer load balancing, so you're bound to need a big, powerful, expensive server with a humongous RAID array for storage and an unlimited data plan.

Conspiracy theorists may actually be tempted to believe that all this was dansup's intention from the get-go: declare it "federated", but make it difficult to host, thus make it a "federated monolith" and control the entirety of it. Or why else did he whip up Loops when he already had Fedilab, the FediDB and Pixelfed to take care of, seeing as Loops was announced before there was an immediate need for a TikTok alternative, but after Bluesky's "decentralisation" claims had been revealed as humbug?

Speaking of the FediDB, look at what software it lists, and then look at what software the Fediverse Observer lists. The Fediverse Observer lists what it can. FediDB lists what dansup allows in, only that he doesn't dare keep server software out that's already fairly well-known.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Pixelfed #Mastodon #Lemmy #Loops

2025-07-18 13:34:13

Rob

rob@skol.social

@jupiter_rowland

I hear everything you’re saying. But the dossier showed to me was both incredibly petty and creepy. If I was Dan, that’s what I would think. Perhaps that might be one reason the community isn’t getting the desired response.

2025-07-18 13:40:46

Rob

rob@skol.social

@jupiter_rowland

In terms of Loops, why is the community assigning malice to this situation? I’ve seen this repeated hostile behavior where the mob comes for server moderators and who gets hurt? The users. The Fediverse.

That’s why I ask the question: if the Fediverse better off with or without Pixelfed? The answer is to me: much better. It brings people in and maybe it’ll motivate someone else to make it better.

2025-07-18 13:44:21

Rob

rob@skol.social

@jupiter_rowland

It took years, but now there are Mastodon clones coming out every couple of weeks. Why? People want different features, they want it to be lighter weight, they want it to be better. Those devs didn’t go around tearing others down. They built new software.

There are Pixelfed alternatives right now. I suspect more are coming.

https://vernissage.photos

2025-07-18 13:51:26

Rob

rob@skol.social

@jupiter_rowland

Side note: have you seen Flashes on Bluesky?

Instead of having a separate Bluesky account, you have one account and Flashes captures your data posts. That’s completely different than Pixelfed and maybe even a superior model. Is Pixelfed the final photo app? Is it the best way to present photos?

Will Loops even take off? Is Looping video the only thing that makes TikTok popular? Let’s see instead of being so negative.

2025-07-18 13:56:06

Rob

rob@skol.social

@jupiter_rowland

I think it’s fair to educate people on the drawbacks of a platform. But attacking the developer is not only harmful but it’s wrong.

The Federated mob loves to talk about freedom, but they also want to control who joins or is on the Fediverse. The mob wants to control speech on the Fediverse.

You cannot cede that control and have freedom. This is a democracy where you win by ideas and persuasion. Sometimes things will happen that you don’t like. That’s the bargain.

2025-07-18 16:33:55

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Rob I'm actually not interested in the ATmosphere at all. While I don't try to lock it out, I prefer to stay disconnected from it. Having no character limit worth speaking of (over 16 million), I simply can't imagine paying attention to the needs of those with a 300-character limit.

And besides, I don't need a dedicated image-posting server app anyway. Hubzilla could theoretically cover all my needs. The only reason why I use (streams), a descendant of Hubzilla from Hubzilla's own creator, for posting images is because (streams) can make Mastodon blank sensitive images out. Both outclass Instagram, Pixelfed and Flashes in terms of features without even breaking a sweat.

As for Loops, I remember that there was quite a bit of a hype when it was announced. I don't know how active it is now, but I haven't seen loops.video way up Fediverse user statistics recently.

Then again, Loops is a TikTok clone and mostly only interesting for people who want to escape TikTok. For all other video-uploading purposes, there's PeerTube which is constantly growing.

Still, I guess Loops fell to the wayside because dansup simply has too many projects to tend to. AFAIK, it's still waiting for an official stable release. (Then again, so is Lemmy, and it isn't like the Lemmings are flocking to PieFed now that it just had its 1.0 release.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Loops #PeerTube

2025-07-18 15:28:30

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Rob Why are people even forking Mastodon left and right?

Is it because they want "Mastodon, but with feature XYZ, but otherwise Mastodon" and not something that's very much not Mastodon?

Or is it because they don't know that Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra etc. are readily available with exactly the feature(s) they want right now? Not to mention the software family that started with Friendica?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Sharkey #Catodon #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte