An open source alternative to Instagram
February 26, 2022 11:25 AM Subscribe
Pixelfed: a potential open source alternative to Instagram. Tired of the algorithm telling you what to watch? Or maybe you want a little less Meta/Facebook in your life? Not trying to make a bunch of money and just share your photos? Check out Pixelfed. It's like the Mastodon of image sharing apps.
Open source, distributed, no algorithm and no advertising.
This is a neat idea, but anyone jumping onboard now should keep in mind it's a project still largely maintained by one developer. The last time I looked there are still quite a few bugs hanging around.
posted by fight or flight at 11:51 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by fight or flight at 11:51 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
This looks like an Instagram version of Mastodon. Is that a correct summation?
posted by dobbs at 11:54 AM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dobbs at 11:54 AM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Check out Pixelfed. It's like the Mastodon of image sharing apps.
Yeah, it's not perfect, and perhaps not sustainable, but I love the idea of it so much.
posted by mecran01 at 11:56 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Yeah, it's not perfect, and perhaps not sustainable, but I love the idea of it so much.
posted by mecran01 at 11:56 AM on February 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Doh! Sorry, somehow missed that in the original post.
posted by dobbs at 12:04 PM on February 26, 2022
posted by dobbs at 12:04 PM on February 26, 2022
The pixelfed.social site seems to have turned off the ability to create an account. Other servers are open though.
posted by dobbs at 12:04 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dobbs at 12:04 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've been using it on and off since it opened up the 3-4 years ago, and it's great. It's a federated service, which means there are a few instances out there that you can become users of, just like Mastodon. A few Mastodon clients also supports it. The dev is great, and seems commited to making it work in the long run.
posted by letraset at 12:13 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by letraset at 12:13 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
As cool as the idea may be, this feels like trying to engineer one's way out of a social problem, which doesn't work. Beyond the sauropod in the middle of the room with the name tag "Hi, I'm Network Effects", there's the fact that federation doesn't solve the administrative issue (and actually introduces a few more issues regarding the fact that instances don't line up with each other in administration), as well as relying on federation for scalability is...questionable at best.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:28 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:28 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
That word "appropriate" is doing so much work. And it's there twice.
posted by emelenjr at 2:05 PM on February 26, 2022
posted by emelenjr at 2:05 PM on February 26, 2022
Network effects don't happen until they do. I think one thing that could make this blow up is if they add reblogging/reposting/retweeting. Another one is simply letting nobodies view pages without logging in, unlike Insta, FB, Pinterest, and more. Registration walls.
There are business model-based limitations in major services that are perennial frustrations, and these open-source and federated services can sit around all day thinking of ways to hack away at Zuckerberg's Achille's Heel-o-tron. I hope they do.
posted by rhizome at 2:24 PM on February 26, 2022
There are business model-based limitations in major services that are perennial frustrations, and these open-source and federated services can sit around all day thinking of ways to hack away at Zuckerberg's Achille's Heel-o-tron. I hope they do.
posted by rhizome at 2:24 PM on February 26, 2022
Can PixelFed automatically syndicate your posts to your Instagram account? I think of all of the artists and other creatives that essentially use Instagram as a combination of gallery and advertisement. That's not even mentioning how many models use it as an on-ramp to their OnlyFans. These kinds users are one of the biggest draws to Instagram and they aren't going to move off of the service because it will have a hugely negative impact on their business. Now, if they could post to PixelFed and set whether that syndicates to their Instagram account then you might seem them draw users off, especially if they could also post non-sydicated things that would get them banned from IG, like links to their store or nipples.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 2:44 PM on February 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by forbiddencabinet at 2:44 PM on February 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
I think most people using mastodon and pixelfed are doing it in part because of the absence of brands and influencers. Talking to other people in a space where you aren’t the product and paying your admin and mod team a few bucks isn’t a perfect setup, but it works well enough for the mastodon instance I’m on and a few other websites I hang out on. *looks around*
When you aren’t trying to sell things/yourself, the smaller network and ability to defederate from the networks with the nazis or mod problems are benefits, not flaws.
posted by congen at 2:51 PM on February 26, 2022 [16 favorites]
When you aren’t trying to sell things/yourself, the smaller network and ability to defederate from the networks with the nazis or mod problems are benefits, not flaws.
posted by congen at 2:51 PM on February 26, 2022 [16 favorites]
Can PixelFed automatically syndicate your posts to your Instagram account?
I would think this would defeat the purpose. Avoiding Instagram is part-and-parcel of what this is, no?
posted by dobbs at 3:17 PM on February 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
I would think this would defeat the purpose. Avoiding Instagram is part-and-parcel of what this is, no?
posted by dobbs at 3:17 PM on February 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
The pixelfed.social site seems to have turned off the ability to create an account.
Pixelfed launched a few years ago, and the ability to create accounts kept being switched on and off. Every time I told friends about it, by the time they read the message and tried to make an account, registrations were closed. Eventually I gave up, and my pixelfed.org has been sitting dormant for the past few years.
I think the creator wants users to set up their own instances or use an instance someone else has set up, and the initial instance is very emphatically not the canonical Pixelfed site.
posted by acb at 3:31 PM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Pixelfed launched a few years ago, and the ability to create accounts kept being switched on and off. Every time I told friends about it, by the time they read the message and tried to make an account, registrations were closed. Eventually I gave up, and my pixelfed.org has been sitting dormant for the past few years.
I think the creator wants users to set up their own instances or use an instance someone else has set up, and the initial instance is very emphatically not the canonical Pixelfed site.
posted by acb at 3:31 PM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
I would think this would defeat the purpose. Avoiding Instagram is part-and-parcel of what this is, no?
Depends on what you think the purpose is. Some folks in the "Open Web" community are happy to use their tools to publish into closed ecosystems as well. Exploiting the network effects of the platforms to do outreach can help the open alternatives gain steam.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
posted by aneel at 4:25 PM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Depends on what you think the purpose is. Some folks in the "Open Web" community are happy to use their tools to publish into closed ecosystems as well. Exploiting the network effects of the platforms to do outreach can help the open alternatives gain steam.
https://indieweb.org/POSSE
posted by aneel at 4:25 PM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
I feel that the problem with Instagram is that it's Instagram. It's huge, it's full of influencers, etc. You can't solve this without taking away what people like about Instagram, because the bad parts are what people like about it in the first place. You can make another photo-sharing network, of course, and there are already a million of them, but it won't replace Instagram.
It's like saying cars have two problems: they're owned and used by individuals and they reach unsafe and energy-wasting speeds, so I will make a car that is communally owned and operated and can't go over 40Kph. That would be great, but it wouldn't be what people think of as a car.
posted by signal at 5:22 PM on February 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
It's like saying cars have two problems: they're owned and used by individuals and they reach unsafe and energy-wasting speeds, so I will make a car that is communally owned and operated and can't go over 40Kph. That would be great, but it wouldn't be what people think of as a car.
posted by signal at 5:22 PM on February 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
That is a great analogy! The number 7 bus is an appropriate alternative to a private car...
(Is the implication of the article using that word meant to be that Instagram is inappropriate? For what, for whom?)
posted by Dysk at 6:55 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
(Is the implication of the article using that word meant to be that Instagram is inappropriate? For what, for whom?)
posted by Dysk at 6:55 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Instagram serves other functions that people and businesses really need, though, and many (most?) of them would love those functions without being all social media about it: here's pictures of what I'm up to, look at them if you're considering hiring me, and you can find me through ads or a printed mention or because you see me on Google Maps or a search. Why the quick/cheap web presence problem hasn't been solved without making it all social media is beyond me, but there you go: folks just want to put stuff up so it's visible.
Um, can anyone link to an example Pixelfed site? I tried navigating to a random one and it got boring and hard.
posted by amtho at 6:58 PM on February 26, 2022
Um, can anyone link to an example Pixelfed site? I tried navigating to a random one and it got boring and hard.
posted by amtho at 6:58 PM on February 26, 2022
Hah, I'd totally forgotten about that site/service. I knew that I'd signed up but not which node (or whatever they call it) but found the confirmation email to pixelfed.social and logged in again. Looks like I created an account in 2019. They're never going to get the critical mass for the network effect with such a confusing and fractured system.
posted by octothorpe at 7:31 PM on February 26, 2022
posted by octothorpe at 7:31 PM on February 26, 2022
I'm so glad people keep making these, personally I'm a text person so I'm happy with dreamwidth and ao3 and metafilter but for image people... it really helps to know you don't HAVE to sell out to fb or insta if all you want to do is find a few likeminded people to hang out with.
posted by subdee at 7:40 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by subdee at 7:40 PM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I don't understand the "distributed" part. Is this peer-to-peer like BitTorent? Do I have to host several gigs of random people's cryptographically-sealed photos to participate? Or are there just a bunch of volunteer private servers? Who pays for those?
posted by straight at 8:06 PM on February 26, 2022
posted by straight at 8:06 PM on February 26, 2022
None of the artists that I know in real life are going to join one of these so I'd just be interacting with internet randos.
posted by octothorpe at 8:49 PM on February 26, 2022
posted by octothorpe at 8:49 PM on February 26, 2022
When you aren’t trying to sell things/yourself, the smaller network and ability to defederate from the networks with the nazis or mod problems are benefits, not flaws.
Even so, I doubt the New York Times makes money from posting on Twitter, other than maintaining brand awareness they already have, so it wouldn't be a big deal for them to add another endpoint for the stuff they're already posting elsewhere. Writers posting on Mastodon or Pixelfed instances wouldn't necessarily ruin the place, even if they might get pushed or kicked off non-commercial public instances. They might have trouble getting their own instances connected, but one of my favorite things about online is the ability to subscribe to individual writers, which should still be possible since there would certainly be instances providing more availability to mainstream (and otherwise) resources. This material could be available in some combinations of servers and not others, all the while there being some kind of overlap.
And in the screenshots in the story, it does look like Pixelfed allows retweeting-type functionality.
posted by rhizome at 9:59 PM on February 26, 2022
Even so, I doubt the New York Times makes money from posting on Twitter, other than maintaining brand awareness they already have, so it wouldn't be a big deal for them to add another endpoint for the stuff they're already posting elsewhere. Writers posting on Mastodon or Pixelfed instances wouldn't necessarily ruin the place, even if they might get pushed or kicked off non-commercial public instances. They might have trouble getting their own instances connected, but one of my favorite things about online is the ability to subscribe to individual writers, which should still be possible since there would certainly be instances providing more availability to mainstream (and otherwise) resources. This material could be available in some combinations of servers and not others, all the while there being some kind of overlap.
And in the screenshots in the story, it does look like Pixelfed allows retweeting-type functionality.
posted by rhizome at 9:59 PM on February 26, 2022
MetaFilter: you'll just be interacting with internet randos.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 10:28 PM on February 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 10:28 PM on February 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
straight typically the volunteer-run servers are paid for by the volunteers
it's not v spendy and some bright kids have time these days sad to say
i cant be on a mastodon these days but when i did it had the pixelfed built into it so you can certainly say that pixelfed is the mastodon of the thing that it is
as to scale, gab.io is a pretty big site and it's a pleroma instance iirc which uses activitypub same like mastodon- so it could technically be added to mastodon if anyone was willing to federate with it :^P
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:18 AM on February 27, 2022
it's not v spendy and some bright kids have time these days sad to say
i cant be on a mastodon these days but when i did it had the pixelfed built into it so you can certainly say that pixelfed is the mastodon of the thing that it is
as to scale, gab.io is a pretty big site and it's a pleroma instance iirc which uses activitypub same like mastodon- so it could technically be added to mastodon if anyone was willing to federate with it :^P
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:18 AM on February 27, 2022
Reddit is legion; you don't read all of MetaFilter/ask/fanfare, so it makes sense to have many small distributed scenes curated and moderated by people invested in those places (over people paid to amplify then to get eyeballs and advertisers).
>I will make a car that is communally owned and operated and can't go over 40Kph.
In the movie adaptation, Hollywood upped the max speed to 50mph/80kph and put a bomb on board.
posted by k3ninho at 2:46 AM on February 27, 2022
>I will make a car that is communally owned and operated and can't go over 40Kph.
In the movie adaptation, Hollywood upped the max speed to 50mph/80kph and put a bomb on board.
posted by k3ninho at 2:46 AM on February 27, 2022
Does anyone still use Flickr? It's what I post my photos to (being violently allergic to the casino-like nature of Instagram, with its FOMO-maximising Skinner-box timeline and autoplaying video ads), though right now it seems mostly like it consists of a few dozen old men with DSLRs distributed around the world.
posted by acb at 2:56 AM on February 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by acb at 2:56 AM on February 27, 2022 [4 favorites]
Decentralised photo sharing? What could possibly go wrong! /eyeroll/
posted by fallingbadgers at 2:56 AM on February 27, 2022
posted by fallingbadgers at 2:56 AM on February 27, 2022
If people are going to be critical here, could you please engage with this seriously? Snide comments with no explanation are really not helpful.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the problems with centralized social media, and the problems with decentralized social media. Mastodon, and ActivityPub generally have serious problems, and I hope that they aren't the future, because it would be pretty bleak if they were. But I still run a Hometown Mastodon server for around a hundred people, because Mastodon is the thing we have right now, it's important for people to be able to get away from centralized social media, and the fediverse works well for a lot of people (and that's true despite it failing to serve many people as well!)
If you think this is fundamentally flawed, I would love to hear why, and what you think a good alternative is, given the problems with centralized social media.
IMO the most major problem with the fediverse (beyond the UI/UX things people have pointed out here, which I don't think are fundamental) is the conflation of the technical administration of servers with community moderation and identity — that makes it so that people who are familiar with the tech are the only ones who can run communities, which has all the problems you'd expect. That's not fundamental to decentralization, but is unfortunately fundamental to ActivityPub :(
posted by wesleyac at 3:36 AM on February 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the problems with centralized social media, and the problems with decentralized social media. Mastodon, and ActivityPub generally have serious problems, and I hope that they aren't the future, because it would be pretty bleak if they were. But I still run a Hometown Mastodon server for around a hundred people, because Mastodon is the thing we have right now, it's important for people to be able to get away from centralized social media, and the fediverse works well for a lot of people (and that's true despite it failing to serve many people as well!)
If you think this is fundamentally flawed, I would love to hear why, and what you think a good alternative is, given the problems with centralized social media.
IMO the most major problem with the fediverse (beyond the UI/UX things people have pointed out here, which I don't think are fundamental) is the conflation of the technical administration of servers with community moderation and identity — that makes it so that people who are familiar with the tech are the only ones who can run communities, which has all the problems you'd expect. That's not fundamental to decentralization, but is unfortunately fundamental to ActivityPub :(
posted by wesleyac at 3:36 AM on February 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
Decentralized? I don't even need that. I need NO ADVERTISING. And if there is a spell you can cast to get friends and family to join, that too.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:26 AM on February 27, 2022
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:26 AM on February 27, 2022
And yeah...can anyone show ANY example? I don't see a page, I don't see a reason to join. I'm obviously missing something.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:31 AM on February 27, 2022
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:31 AM on February 27, 2022
It's the old argument, right? Am I willing to pay for a service by being exposed to ads, having my data harvested, or with my money?
posted by Zumbador at 5:40 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Zumbador at 5:40 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
I joined a while ago. It's okay, but the lack of a mobile app really hurts. Which is funny, because there are lots of Mastodon mobile apps available. And it suffers from the same issue Mastodon (and Google+, if you remember that one) has: you're never going to get grandma and grandpa to use it. What works for techies and small communities of like-minded folks generally doesn't work for the masses, who just want to join and use a service, not have to spend time selecting from a palette of special interest groups.
posted by tommasz at 5:42 AM on February 27, 2022
posted by tommasz at 5:42 AM on February 27, 2022
If you think this is fundamentally flawed, I would love to hear why, and what you think a good alternative is, given the problems with centralized social media.
The whole point of an image sharing system is that you want thousands or millions of people to sign up to create enough of a reason to use the site since it's all user generated content but the sign-up procedure is baffling to an outsider. If you click on the "Join" button on the front page, you're confronted with a page with zero instructions and just a seemingly endless list of server names all with the exact same description and nothing to tell you how to proceed. Currently, if you click on the first one (pixelfed.social) , you get no "join" button and a page full of stats and two big blobs of JSON.
Why would anyone want to try to puzzle their way through all that hostile UX?
posted by octothorpe at 6:06 AM on February 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
The whole point of an image sharing system is that you want thousands or millions of people to sign up to create enough of a reason to use the site since it's all user generated content but the sign-up procedure is baffling to an outsider. If you click on the "Join" button on the front page, you're confronted with a page with zero instructions and just a seemingly endless list of server names all with the exact same description and nothing to tell you how to proceed. Currently, if you click on the first one (pixelfed.social) , you get no "join" button and a page full of stats and two big blobs of JSON.
Why would anyone want to try to puzzle their way through all that hostile UX?
posted by octothorpe at 6:06 AM on February 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
See also: https://glass.photo
No ads because you have to pay to join, a little like MeFi. iOS app only.
posted by endquote at 7:52 AM on February 27, 2022
No ads because you have to pay to join, a little like MeFi. iOS app only.
posted by endquote at 7:52 AM on February 27, 2022
Yeah, I was excited about that one but iOS only makes it a non-starter.
posted by octothorpe at 8:24 AM on February 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 8:24 AM on February 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
The instagram.com website with an ad-blocker turned on isn't too bad either.
posted by endquote at 8:25 AM on February 27, 2022
posted by endquote at 8:25 AM on February 27, 2022
The instagram.com website with an ad-blocker turned on isn't too bad either.
Though one cannot upload through the site, and there is still no chronological feed. You really need to use the app to interact with people, and the app is designed to manipulate and monetise you rather than serving you.
posted by acb at 9:08 AM on February 27, 2022
Though one cannot upload through the site, and there is still no chronological feed. You really need to use the app to interact with people, and the app is designed to manipulate and monetise you rather than serving you.
posted by acb at 9:08 AM on February 27, 2022
You've been able to post photos from the Instagram website for a while now.
posted by octothorpe at 10:08 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by octothorpe at 10:08 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Linking to the main Pixelfed page might be more productive than this article with a bunch of snapshots from it? https://pixelfed.org
The "join" page on the main Pixelfed project site might be helpful too, though it does have the same problem Mastodon has of "which of these seemingly indistinguishable servers should I pick". This is a big problem that everything in the Fediverse* has and that nobody has any real idea how to fix that I've seen. Mastodon's "join" page at least has some rudimentary filtering but Pixelfed just lists ten sites out of the nearly two hundred servers it knows about, seemingly sorted by usercount. And none of them seem to have changed the description string, so they all have the generic "Pixelfed is an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centralized platforms" description. No help there!
The people on my Mastodon server are largely there for a few reasons: they are my friends or acquaintances, they trust my moderation to be sympathetic to their values, one of their friends was on there and got them an invitation, or they think being on dragon.style sounds cool. Or all of the above. And I kinda like this; it has a bit of the feeling of a BBS run for the local community, rather than a part of a monolithic Skinner box of a social network. It's small and local. Presumably the right Pixelfed server to join is one that meets similar criteria but right now it's really impossible to tell.
Is anyone here running a Pixelfed instance? Or using one that you would recommend? Why would you recommend the one you run/use?
posted by egypturnash at 10:22 AM on February 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
The "join" page on the main Pixelfed project site might be helpful too, though it does have the same problem Mastodon has of "which of these seemingly indistinguishable servers should I pick". This is a big problem that everything in the Fediverse* has and that nobody has any real idea how to fix that I've seen. Mastodon's "join" page at least has some rudimentary filtering but Pixelfed just lists ten sites out of the nearly two hundred servers it knows about, seemingly sorted by usercount. And none of them seem to have changed the description string, so they all have the generic "Pixelfed is an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centralized platforms" description. No help there!
The people on my Mastodon server are largely there for a few reasons: they are my friends or acquaintances, they trust my moderation to be sympathetic to their values, one of their friends was on there and got them an invitation, or they think being on dragon.style sounds cool. Or all of the above. And I kinda like this; it has a bit of the feeling of a BBS run for the local community, rather than a part of a monolithic Skinner box of a social network. It's small and local. Presumably the right Pixelfed server to join is one that meets similar criteria but right now it's really impossible to tell.
Is anyone here running a Pixelfed instance? Or using one that you would recommend? Why would you recommend the one you run/use?
posted by egypturnash at 10:22 AM on February 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
The people on my Mastodon server are largely there for a few reasons:
I used to be on one of these, it was great, but eventually the owner lost interest (can't really blame them), and it went away. This kind of seems like a really likely 1-3 year outcome for a personally run fediverse instance, if you think about it, drastically compounding the "which one do I join" problem. Also not sure about what to do about this; this happening killed any momentum I had for getting back into Mastodon though (or being inclined to try out something like this).
posted by advil at 11:18 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
I used to be on one of these, it was great, but eventually the owner lost interest (can't really blame them), and it went away. This kind of seems like a really likely 1-3 year outcome for a personally run fediverse instance, if you think about it, drastically compounding the "which one do I join" problem. Also not sure about what to do about this; this happening killed any momentum I had for getting back into Mastodon though (or being inclined to try out something like this).
posted by advil at 11:18 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
I know many in my community of professional still photographers who would love for any viable alternative to instagram. The algorithm seems to have gotten worse over the past few years, still photos are less and less a priority for the platform, insta seems to want us to pay to "boost" our posts to a larger portion of our audiences, and many don't want to support facebook in any way. And yet we mostly all remain on instagram because that's where the audience (of peers/colleagues, of photo editors, of photo enthusiasts) still is. And the pro photo community still has a few very active facebook groups; everyone wants to ditch facebook, but that's where the most people are, so that's where many logistics/business conversations still happen.
I've lamented within the photo community recently how much harder it is to keep up with photography these days: facebook cannibalized most blogs and the ones that remain seem focused on gear rather than photos and problems with the algorithm mentioned above means one's feed often doesn't surface the work of colleagues that I might like to see (there are a few accounts that I have to manually search for in order to see their work; they never show up when scrolling). I was listening to the Content Mines podcast a while back and when asked what the internet felt like that week, one of the hosts said it felt empty, and I often get that feeling scrolling facebook and instagram.
I've had my eye on pixelfed for a few years, and hope it succeeds and draws enough of an audience to move people away from instagram, but I am not optimistic. Glass is a non-starter for me because I don't use apple products and have no idea how the audience is.
posted by msbrauer at 6:48 AM on March 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've lamented within the photo community recently how much harder it is to keep up with photography these days: facebook cannibalized most blogs and the ones that remain seem focused on gear rather than photos and problems with the algorithm mentioned above means one's feed often doesn't surface the work of colleagues that I might like to see (there are a few accounts that I have to manually search for in order to see their work; they never show up when scrolling). I was listening to the Content Mines podcast a while back and when asked what the internet felt like that week, one of the hosts said it felt empty, and I often get that feeling scrolling facebook and instagram.
I've had my eye on pixelfed for a few years, and hope it succeeds and draws enough of an audience to move people away from instagram, but I am not optimistic. Glass is a non-starter for me because I don't use apple products and have no idea how the audience is.
posted by msbrauer at 6:48 AM on March 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
That's a pretty good summary of the situation, msbrauer. I'm just an amateur art photographer but I'm friends with a lot of pros and Facebook and Instagram are the only places that we've found to communicate. I don't think that too many people are happy about that, Instagram has so many annoying limitations, like how difficult it makes it to link to anything outside of it, but there's no viable alternative.
posted by octothorpe at 8:55 AM on March 1, 2022
posted by octothorpe at 8:55 AM on March 1, 2022
Facebook and Instagram are the only places that we've found to communicate
I've literally gotten two good-paying assignments from a facebook group in the past 10 days. I've helped other photographers deal with contract negotiations in another facebook group. I've seen people coordinating coverage logistics on the Poland border in another facebook group. I've seen a group of Ukrainian PR professionals connect with international journalists in another. And on instagram, I've had direct interactions with both colleagues and editors I work with or would love to work with at major magazines in the last week or so.
For as much as we all hate using facebook/insta, it's still where people are for our industry, for better or worse. I can't replace any of the above at the moment; they remain vital tools to me and other photographers and journalists.
Of course I've also seen numerous conversations in the same time period complaining about how still photography is taking a back seat to reels and other video on instagram, and that's been concerning for photographers as we've all seen engagement drop, though I did see engagement increase on my personal account directly after @nytimes posted a couple of my pictures over the past few weeks.
I've also gotten a few things from Instagram over the years: they sent me a designer sweatshirt last year as part of "creator week," they gave me an ad-free feed for years (ended in 2021) after I became a curated "suggested user" years ago, they gave me a one-a-day calendar of IG pet photos one year. Incidentally one of my biggest frustrations is that when I became a "suggested user" was the same time as Iran allowed access to Instagram, so I got like 10K followers from Iran and 20K spam/bot followers. Just a couple weeks ago I sent a Instagram a creator support request to figure out how to get spam/bot/dead accounts out of my follower list and they sent back a form response saying they have no way to identify which accounts are spam, so I'm stuck with it.
FB Purity makes facebook a lot better (and also less enticing for endless scrolling) with the right settings. Instagram on my desktop with ublock origin seems to be a better experience than the phone, but doesn't completely eliminate the algorithm's choices.
Phew....sorry for the rant; ended up longer than expected.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep using facebook/insta, but I'd really love anything else that does the above and also focuses on still photos and showing me photos from everyone I've followed as they post.
posted by msbrauer at 6:47 AM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've literally gotten two good-paying assignments from a facebook group in the past 10 days. I've helped other photographers deal with contract negotiations in another facebook group. I've seen people coordinating coverage logistics on the Poland border in another facebook group. I've seen a group of Ukrainian PR professionals connect with international journalists in another. And on instagram, I've had direct interactions with both colleagues and editors I work with or would love to work with at major magazines in the last week or so.
For as much as we all hate using facebook/insta, it's still where people are for our industry, for better or worse. I can't replace any of the above at the moment; they remain vital tools to me and other photographers and journalists.
Of course I've also seen numerous conversations in the same time period complaining about how still photography is taking a back seat to reels and other video on instagram, and that's been concerning for photographers as we've all seen engagement drop, though I did see engagement increase on my personal account directly after @nytimes posted a couple of my pictures over the past few weeks.
I've also gotten a few things from Instagram over the years: they sent me a designer sweatshirt last year as part of "creator week," they gave me an ad-free feed for years (ended in 2021) after I became a curated "suggested user" years ago, they gave me a one-a-day calendar of IG pet photos one year. Incidentally one of my biggest frustrations is that when I became a "suggested user" was the same time as Iran allowed access to Instagram, so I got like 10K followers from Iran and 20K spam/bot followers. Just a couple weeks ago I sent a Instagram a creator support request to figure out how to get spam/bot/dead accounts out of my follower list and they sent back a form response saying they have no way to identify which accounts are spam, so I'm stuck with it.
FB Purity makes facebook a lot better (and also less enticing for endless scrolling) with the right settings. Instagram on my desktop with ublock origin seems to be a better experience than the phone, but doesn't completely eliminate the algorithm's choices.
Phew....sorry for the rant; ended up longer than expected.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep using facebook/insta, but I'd really love anything else that does the above and also focuses on still photos and showing me photos from everyone I've followed as they post.
posted by msbrauer at 6:47 AM on March 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older Classic Megaposts Remixed | Encyclopaedia of weeds and their seedlings Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by oulipian at 11:40 AM on February 26, 2022