Pixelfed just overtook Lemmy as the 4th most used Fediverse software.

When a fediverse app wins, the whole fediverse wins. A rising tide lifts all ships or however it goes.
- iirc it goes "chafing thighs attract all chicks"

People like looking at photos of food and cats more than being railed for having "incorrect* political viewpoints? (/s for anyone not picking up on that btw:-P)
- I literally just got called a snowflake in another thread for saying people should stop posting US politics in general communities. People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse... Sometimes I wonder why I still bother here.
  
  Yeah, that's definitely a shame. Let's see how it goes, but I'm about to create a !usdefaultism somewhere just to list those occurrences
  
  i just hate the way most people here assume everyone is coming from US smh
  
  I guess I am a snowflake too then, bc to me consent should matter. And while the USA is a part of the world, and also has an oversized effect upon it due to the size of the economy and trade deals and the like, it also can be overwhelming for some, who feel ostracized and left out as if only the big guys (and guns) matter.
  But on the other hand, it is known that moderation sucks across the vast majority of Lemmy - it's somewhat baked right into the tools themselves, e.g. removing whole posts rather than merely taking them out of the community lists but allowing people to continue their discussions already begun, as Reddit does.
  So you may want to take it upon yourself to either start blocking by keywords (maybe find an app that allows that - I'm not sure which ones), or user accounts that do that, or even find a better community to engage with.
  Though I agree with your conclusion: I no longer recommend Lemmy to people irl by virtue of having been burned by that far too many times before. We're toxic AF in this Alt-Left (rather than Alt-Right) "Nazi bar" space, and a lot of the people here are legit those banned from Reddit for exactly that behavior.
  
  Someone called you a snowflake? Ok....uh, I'll call you a carrot.
  But also, I don't understand the rules for this game. It's a snowman game, right?
  
  I don't disagree it's an issue, but what should be allowed in general communities? If any other nation's politics are allowed, then you can't really just not allow US politics (unless you make that a rule for the community and part of its purpose, which is fine).
  There are just more Americans here than any particular other nationality, so you get more US content on average. You'll need specific non-US communities if you want to avoid it. Expecting general communities to not reflect the general audience is a little absurd.
  
  It’s what’s turned me off this entire time. Everything is replied to with someone virtue signaling.
  
  I just got called a rapist! For asking wtf she was wearing, fashion wise. (On a non rape story just to be clear). I also wonder why I'm still here. Y'all need to be better.
- Its nice right now...Hope it stays.
- How dare you!! Here's why you need to be vegan right now by the way grumble grumble grumble
  
  Oh excuse me, while I convert my entire personality to incorporate that energy...
  There, done! I am now okay with murdering anyone who is okay with, ah... murdering a uh... wait, I may see a problem here.:-P
- It is your fault President Musk got elected, shitlord!!!!

Kick ass! I'm all for more Fediverse stuff getting popular, and if this has any competition, just means more features will be added across all of them.

Hell yeah! 2025 is the year of the ~~linux~~ Fediverse ~~desktop~~!

If you look at monthly active users instead of total users, Pixelfed is a strong 2nd place.
- What are you guys posting pictures of over on pixelfed? What's goin' on over there that's so popular? Is it more politics, and social issues? Or is it cats?
  
  There's a sudden influx of users from instagram and tiktok and whatnot because of the ban, zuckerberg fellating Trump, and all of that stuff going on. So the answer to "What's getting posted?" is "everything"
  
  Crazy enough. People are posting what they were posting on instagram.
  
  I dunno, I only follow capybarabot.
  
  My dog. no really, hes a good boy.
  And I follow one of the people from an Aquarium with fantastic shots.
  
  Everything. It’s like early days Instagram, but people are more politically and socially aware, and posting about those things.
  
  From what I have found, its almost all photos of animals and nature. Honestly I am kinda disappointed. I want memes. I also got onto Loops and that is also mostly animals and nature, but with the very occasional funny.
  
  I posted a guide to modding a tatacon for taiko no tatsujin
  
  It's mostly landscape, food, and cats.
  I'm mainly posting dogs and computers
- ikr lemmy has a little over 40k active users. If you look at the first data point just as the slope starts to rise, that's where lemmy is by comparison:
  Total users is pretty meaningless bc it includes things like users who left and will never return, and bot accounts.
- Misskey should have more active users, even more than Pixelfed right now. Almost all Japanese fediverse users are on Misskey instances.
  A lot of post in Misskey instance are often followers only. I know several instance that the admin say they have thousands of users but simply not reporting any MAU users for certain reason. Even the one that report them are usually lower than actual MAU due to "offline mode"
  
  I've been wondering about that - the Misskey numbers are very weird, with MAU even lower than the number of new users that join in an average month. But this is a good explanation, thanks. It's just too bad there's not a good way to get MAU for them.
- What’s first?
  
  Mastodon

Is this the fediverse's answer to Instagram?
- Yes.
  -Instagram has pixelfed. -Reddit has lemmy -X has Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma (&forks..) -Tiktok has loops (app still super rough around the edges and sadly on limited to one instance rather than having its own software from what i understand) -Youtube has peertube (so far the least used i think)
  
  I can't wait for peertube to take off. I think of all of the social medias, youtube has the most enduring monopoly, because hosting is such a huge barrier it's got even more of a natural monopoly than regular social media.
  I think once peertube can start ascending that might be the ballgame for decentralised social media in general.
  
  I dont understand how to join or post on peertube, its the most confusing, do you host your own, is there a feed of all the servers?
  
  Yea peertube is rough... Mostly in part due to, in my opinion at least, people wanting to make use of YouTube's ad revenue system even tho most creators I watch making most of their income via donations rather than ad revenue.
  
  Is there federated Tumblr? @Newbuild@lemmy.nz is still on Tumblr and drag wants to get thing away from corporate media even if Tumblr has a better record than literally every other corpo media
  
  Where does Honk fit into this? https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk
- Yes and the same developer does Loops, the TikTok "equivalent"
  Not sure when he sleeps

fuck it, I tried mastodon, I'll give pixelfed a try too.
- https://pixelfed.org/
- Thanks to Fedilab, I can't tell the difference!
- Just tried to sign up for over thirty minutes, this'll always be the biggest barrier. I have an account but can't seem to login.
- Same, just created an account on metapixl.com even though I never used Instagram before
- I’ve liked pixelfed. I don’t use it much though because my friends aren’t on it so I don’t see much of a point.

- ✊
- Why are you mad, Lemmy.ml and its constant propaganda and misinformation is one of the main reasons Lemmy isn't thriving.
  
  LW dwarfes Lemmy.ml by any possible metric
  https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active
  https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_month
  It's just that IG is much more popular than Reddit, so the Fediverse equivalents have the same ratio
  
  Try not to project .world on .ml for 5 seconds difficulty level impossible

My feed on Pixelfed is way better the second week, now that I've followed a couple dozen folks and put some posts out there.
And pro tip: Post and tag a cute picture of your pet and people will see your account.
- They need some starter packs like BlueSky because all I’m seeing are some art photography highly likely ai generated - and I have no idea where to find content that has any value. On searching the hashtags I’m getting mastodon posts containing links that can’t be clicked.
  
  I thought that my first couple of days, but TBH, I actually really like that Fedi social media is completely self-directed. Not having the Jack Dorseys, Donald Trumps, and Zuckerbergs of the world vomiting content or stupid ads onto my feed is well worth the modicum of extra effort.
  I found half of the people I'm following just by posting a picture of my dog and tagging it #CuteAnimals, and that got a nice response. I do follow a few hashtags and found follows there, but I will probably take them off once I'm up to 30-40 follows and I like my feed.
  
  Mastodon has third-party starter packs now. I wonder if it works for Pixelfed?
  
  Search with the magnifying glass icon. In Discover maybe you can find something.

Is there any integration with Lemmy? Cross promotion would be awesome, and something big tech can’t actually do.
I am but a humble end user using the web interface, but I do know mastodon comments can somehow show up on Lemmy.
- Hello from Mastodon.
  All of these "talk" ActivityPub so Pixelfed should already integrate in some form with Lemmy.
  
  How are you responding from masto without the @ ?
  I've never seen that before
- Moderately certain this is already happening, as evidenced by loops showing up so often in my "all" tab. If I understand correctly (and for the love of all that is good, someone please correct me if I'm wrong), Loops is "hosted" via pixelfed.
  
  I think you are just seeing people repost loops to Lemmy as Loops isn’t federated yet
- I'm not sure about Lemmy, but I found this post to be a good explanation of how Pixelfed interacts with Mastodon.
  Based on what it says there, I wouldn't really expect it to play-nice with Lemmy though. We might be able to access Pixelfed posts here on Lemmy, but almost certainly not the other way around - because Pixelfed requires an image in every post.
- yeah I also want some clarity around how that works and if it's functional rnow.

I was curious what the other apps were, found the list: https://fedidb.org/software
- Any entry into the Fediverse is a good one!
  Gateway drug!

Good for pixelfed

Not surprising. As long as they can afford the servers, it will probably get to Mastadon levels.
Lemmy is a replacement for reddit, and reddit was always much smaller than Instagram.
- Hopefully people are willing to donate to their instances to keep them financially healthy. It'll be a pretty big issue for growth if it starts to get popular but the larger instances can't afford to stay operational and disappear.

Does anyone have recommendations who to follow on pixelfed?
- Yeah dude me obviously. @mayur@pixelfed.social
- Yesterday I revived my old Pixelfed account, and I have set myself a challenge, upload one photo every day for a month.
  I have plenty of photos from the last decade to pick from
  I don't know if this will mean that my account will be active in the long run, but I'll give it an honest try.
  I posted this earlier in the thread:
  https://pxlmo.com/p/stoy/787786012092436062
  @stoy@pxlmo.com
- I’m uploading shit daily. At least I’ll keep your feed busy.
  Me.

Nice.
- Nice.

People share photos and videos all the time on mastodon. What is the difference with pixelfed?
- Everything on Fedi is just different interfaces and perf from the user perspective.
  People want to continue to use something close to Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter but not be locked to their enshitified companies who decide what they get to see.
  Many that come over find out there's no algorithm and that they have to follow people to get any content, they find they miss the doom scroll and go straight back.
  
  Every one of these federated apps needs a strong meme feed. Just an endless stream of shitposts and funny content. Doesn't need to be doomscrolling, just needs to be a constantly available source of low effort junk food content
- It’s like saying “people share photos and videos all the time on Twitter. What is the difference with Instagram?”
  
  I mean, yeah, what's the difference?
  
  So one is for spreading right wing propaganda and one is for shilling knockoff perfumes?
- Better UI and a better discover page mainly. Plus it's gotten a lot of organic advertising just from luck and people talking about it, and no obvious competitor like Bluesky
- Different vibes. I am really liking the pixelfed UI.
- Pixelfed allows video?
  
  Yes. No transcoding, but that's actually a feature as far as I'm concerned.

... which is absolutely understandable considering how lemmy is most of the time,
it's politics non-stop, one bad news after another, everyone is quick to bash somebody as either a nazi or a tankie or something else.
- there aren't many places where you can discuss politics or at least try to find comfort in seeing others think somewhat same way. No wonder its all concentrating here. But there definitely should be a lot more non-politics content.

It is simple and free of bloat. I like it much better than that youtube shorts analog I can't remember the name of.
- Yeah but pixelfed is coming out with loops, it's been on beta for awhile, that is basically Tik Tok with no ads or government/big tech ownership. I personally feel like that could have taken a giant chunk of the Tik Tok users and kept them from having to learn to read ideograms to access content they wanted. I don't personally use that format of social media but I tried it on Android and it looks just like Tik Tok looked that I have seen on others devices.
  
  The only reason why no company could take over TikTok is their algorithm, its the worst yet the best part of the app, since you only see stuff you like, without having to search for similar accounts. I’ve been feeling lonely on the Fedi compared to other socials
  
  I just can't imagine who will pay for that sort of reach. It's incredibly expensive for self hosting operations like TikTok. I'd imagine it'd be outrageous without a CDN.
- Runs much faster than java BlueSky, the destroyer of batteries.

I'm just worried a lack of content discovery, (foss) algorithms, other features and consistent development will have an adverse effect on this new growth. I'm glad that Dan finally got the apps on the stores at a critical moment though or we wouldn't even be here.
- This is the issue. These apps don't use algorithms that made the apps they are meant to replace popular in the first place. People may come, but I fear they won't stay when it's not an exact clone of what they know.
  
  At the very least though, at least the algorithms are open source so we know exactly how hot, rising, and scaled are sorted in Lemmy at least and so people who want those algorithms can choose if they wish and those who don’t want them don’t have to have them.
  We should train people to mindfully find content. Content discovery algorithms just encourage shitposting. Just put the top posts by favorites or boosts or whatever they are called on Pixelfed in a special trending feed and then just sort your follows by chronological and local by chronological. But as long as their is options, I won’t complain.
  
  Only enough people need to stay to make it a viable alternative for many. And even if it’s just the first step in migration away from Twitter/Meta then that’s still at least a step taken.

Everything helps.
No corporations in social media. No venture capital in social media.

Oh you mean people don't like being shouted and cursed at for having a moderate opinion.
- you're comparing apples to oranges. Lemmy is for discussions pixelfed is for posting photos.
- I mean people like mastodon and it’s full of the same takes. But on mastodon if you post a pro capitalist post to your timeline, people just ignore. Unlike on Lemmy where you have to post it on a post that’s likely to garner a response

Looks really cool, just discovered something liket his existed.

It ain't a competition!!!
Plus I see that pixelped crowd can join the shit posters if they so chose?
Win win for fedi

My account got deleted for inactivity like forever ago. I don't post pics and there wasn't much there at the time, I wish they'd have left it but I understand.
Anyway, what's a good instance to make a new account? Mostly gonna lurk, don't post pics much (or really at all), as I said.
- I like gram.social

One question, does LBRY (The protocol powering Odysee) count as something Federated ?
- There was a github request to integrate lbry into fedi, but it never gained any traction.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse#/media/File:A_view_into_the_Fediverse.png
  So, no, they're not in the fediverse and don't interconnect with the other players.
  Here are the current places that play well together.
  Odysee had a shot at making it bigger than it was, but it's really drowning in bad (moral and qualty) content. They never really recovered from their crypto scheme, once the SEC started looking into them, they got screwed. I'm down with the idea of paying creators in crypto, but they were selling it as a security.
  
  Would you be glad to know that LBRY is trying to revive itself
- Does Odysee even use LBRY anymore? They abandoned the desktop app a while ago and I'm not sure how else you can use the protocol
  (if so, then assuming everything is on Odysee then it's about as federated as Bluesky)
  
  Well....... LBRY is hosting a fundraiser to revive & strengthen the project. Including setting up nodes for Charity purposes like for Public Domain stuff
- it's all fascists and cryptobros
  
  That's not a sane thought-process my friend, there are fascists in all platforms

Misskey seems really popular looking at numbers. I'm confused because nobody talks about it. Is it because of some niche super active audience?
- It's big in Japan. Most of the servers are Japanese.
- Its active in the non-english circles from what I hear. Probably a part of it.
- Are they using the number.....100???

I don't know if Lemmy is for everyone, but I'm very happy to see the fedicerse gaining more traction.
Every user that onboards to pixelfed is going to now understand how to set up mastodon.
Blue sky is basically trying the exact same thing and expecting a different result.

so how do we interact with pixelfed from lemmy or mastodon?
- Yes! We need a better interface between them

What are the top 2? Mastodon and what else?
- By registered accounts:
  Mastodon
  Misskey
  PeerTube
  
  How the fuck is peertube above Lemmy??? What the actual fuck??? Everytime I go there, it's the same 3 people who've made like 5 daily videos about linux....and nothing else ever.
  I get that I'm not exactly the target linux audience, but if KDE pulls an update from version 6.1 to 6.2, THAT IS NOT BREAKING NEWS!!! You do not need 10 videos discussing the 4 new features every time any linux software updates.
  But THAT has more users than THIS??? It's a broken down joke with a lot of potential that will never be realized until their search becomes intutive and all inclusive! I should have video results natively within the same page that pulls from ALL of peertube. Not just the current instance.
  "Trending" should default to trending on all of peertube. You can include a filter to show trending on local instance only, but it shouldn't be the default.
  
  Mastodon is twitter, peer tube is youtube, foxelfed is Instagram.... What is misskey?
  
  thanks. the link for this gives me what looks like a terminal. I sorta wish there was more of a centralized login thing.

That might have been me:
https://pxlmo.com/p/stoy/787786012092436062

Whats pixelfed all about? Im only now hearing about it.
- photo sharing fediverse platform
  
  Any good Android apps?

Neat, is there a way to share from Immich to Pixelfed?
- Manually copy and paste?
  Immich is a photo storage software and the other is social media site.
  
  How about an Immich integration, e.g. a button that says "Share via my PixedFed account" or even just the icon that would then post it on your behalf?

Also does anyone know how to get the post into lemmy? Im having issues importing other fediverse posts so I had to direct link. I would rather the owner of the post get recognition and likes/shares show up in mastodon/activityhub rather than just a static link on lemmy if possible.
For example on mastodon/pixelfed/etc... I can pull the remote url and create a post/share. It seems specific to lemmy.world. On other lemmy platforms, I can see posts, just older ones.
- That’s the neat part! Lemmy.world doesn’t allow that😂😂😂. Best bet to move over to another instance if you like that type of integration.
  Edited for misinterpretation
  
  I thought I could do that on other lemmy instances?"
  I can see: https://lemmy.world/u/atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org for example, it just isnt pulling anything new.
  and nothing but you can see the user here: https://piefed.social/u/atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org

So they really want to compete then? 🧐
- "compete" is a strong word. They can see us and we can see them. People are already posting from pixelfed to lemmy so its just pushing both platforms forward.
  
  I wouldnt be into anything like Instagram so it would hardly be interchangeable with something like Lemmy (Reddit) for me. If they get more people turned on to the Fediverse than sweet
  
  Is it like with Mastodon? Do I need a separate account to use Pixelfed well?
- They will join us once the long promised groups implementation is finally merged in Pixelfed.
  
  It has definitely been long promised
- I wouldn’t say it was competing, it would be like saying Reddit and Instagram competed.
  
  Yes , I was joking

- https://atomicpoet.org/notice/AqLpIQFs0Qk00FaWZs
  
  Unfortunately that doesn't work in lw

It's always going to be like that; photo blogging is a lot more popular than niche forums and bulletin boards.
Also, Pixelfed has a lot more eyes on it because of Meta being in the news.
It's not a bad thing though.

yay i guess?

Does the server matter at all? Wasn't able to find a straight pixelfed.ca like I did with Lemmy, but it seems like people always end up dunking on the larger servers or defederating them because of Nazis.

Still feels empty
- Pixelfed does?
  
  The app only allows for local posts and you can't switch to global making it feel smaller than it is.

Anyone have success joining pixelfed.art? Still waiting to get approved over a week later.

I want to use it more but the android app never works. What's the deal? Keeps saying it's trying to connect to an outdated instance of pixelfed.social.
- Maybe try a different instance, they're probably getting slammed with more traffic than they can handle.
  
  After an app update, it started working! Yay!

Pixelfed-eral police

What made the boom?
- ......have you not been following the news the past 6 months?
  
  Is it just about censorship on instagram after Zuckerberg Musk-olinization?

I'm finding the iOS app buggy as heck. It just crashes as soon as I open it. Had to delete it. May try again later.

SPLITTERS!