Fediverse

Come on, the whole purpose of pixelfed is to be an image federated platform.

If you want something different, use something different.

You ordered a pizza and are complaining it isn't a salad.

To me, this is a very strange take. As a Pixelfed user I absolutely don’t expect to see text posts on there. It’s very clearly a platform for sharing images.

It make sense for PixelFed to only display pictures, the same way it makes sense for Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to only show posts made on a community.

Using ActivityPub doesn't mean you can't have different formats and platforms.

Can't wait for the follow up post decrying PeerTube for only allowing videos, or Bookwrym for only allowing book reviews. Just because it's ActivityPub doesn't mean it has to be a Twitter timeline.

Once a major actor in a decentralised network starts to mess with the protocol, there are only two possible output: either that actor lose steam or that actor becomes dominant enough to impose its own vision of the protocol. In fact, there’s a third option: the whole protocol becomes irrelevant because nobody trust it anymore.

You mean like Mastodon? Where's the angry diatribe about Mastodon not allowing posts to have more than 4 pictures despite other platforms allowing more (Pixelfed allows up to 20 for example)?

this is a dumbest opinion out of all the dumb fediverse opinions i've read.

I go to pixelfed to post my art and view other peoples art. that's it. I don't go there to read posts or what's going on in peoples lives. For that I have Akkoma/Mastodon. If I want further interaction and discussion I have Piefed/Lemmy.

this blog post just reeks of "I need my voice to be heard on all the various platforms at the same time and I don't want to go to each individual platform to do it" well I'm sorry cupcake that's now how things work. Why isn't this person complaining about Piefeed posts not showing up on Mastodon or vice versa?

If I sign up to Instagram I don't expect to see facebook posts. Most people understand this concept. People aren't going to go to Pixelfeed and then assume they instantly have access to view Mastodon and Lemmy at the same time.

The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse
(...)
This is a grave abuse of the protocol: messages are silently dropped. It stands against everything the Fediverse is trying to do: allow users to communicate. My experience with open protocols allows me to say that it is a critical problem and that it cannot be tolerated. Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"?

Oh, the drama. I think this is a wrong take. The point of ActivityPub is not that we all see everything. Is so the servers can exchange activities. But whether it makes sense to put it in our inboxes or not, depends on what particular application is supposed to do. If using AP would require the application to show everything, what would be the differences between the apps?

I use Threadiverse because I prefer a bit more structured content than what's happening on Mastodon. While I would love to be able to follow the few accounts and tags on Mastodon that interest me, the fact that I don't see all that traffic is not an abuse of the protocol

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, since

Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram

Then what Pixelfed does is also correct, Instagram also does not show the whole wall from Facebook. Only the pictures, right?

This article's core argument seems to be that Pixelfed is violating the ActivityPub protocol by not displaying posts that do not contain images. That's just not true at all. I'm interested to know where the protocol ever has such a requirement.

The principle behind a communication protocol is to create trust that messages are transmitted.

And they have been transmitted. They've been filtered out after transmission, but the protocol did its job.

If a message is not delivered, the sender should be notified.

Perhaps. But that's not in the spec. There's no obligation to notify iirc that a post got filtered out on the target instance.

Even if Pixelfed sent Reject(Note) back for every post without an image, would Mastodon even display that to the user anywhere? Would most users want to see that for every post not containing an image multiplied by every Pixelfed instance it got federated to? I'd personally interpret that as spam.

I read the post and understood the problem. Then I read Dan's reply. And he's fixing it. In fact, he's fixing it in the exact way the blog post says it should be fixed, "... but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable."

Here's Dan's reply:

"... I hear the community: you want text-only posts. We are going to build this as an opt-in feature. If you want microblogging, turn it on. If you prefer the classic media-only experience, nothing changes."

Why was this blog post even written then? Now it's seeming to be personal.

the fediverse is just a collection of content across multiple sites; activitypub items can be one of many types. how is limiting the display of fediverse content on an app to just image types "being against the fediverse"?

why would i want to see text posts when i join a photo sharing app?

I don't think every Fediverse platform needs to support every type of post, and I especially don't think it's an impending catastrophe if they don't. In fact I think it's better to specialize. Even though Mbin supports microblogging, I prefer using this account solely for threads and a separate Pleroma account for microblogging.

I remember reading that Loops (? - may be wrong about which one) does the same thing, only displaying statuses with videos in them. I have not, so far, seen anyone claim that that is a bad thing, and frankly don't agree that it is. If we can't do that, then we can never have specialized platforms built on ActivityPub, e.g. platforms only for videos or for photos, etc., and that would severely limit what we can do with it.

I sure do like this picture:

collapsed inline media

Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures.

Sign me up!

Nice ragebait title for some clicks

I can understand the reservation against an AP-Platform not making clear that they display only a subset of messages, but not against the practice by itself. After all, it's a platform specifically for showing images. A notification when following a non-pixelfed account that only image posts will be shown would do the trick too, but implementing the option to view text posts gives the user more agency, which is normally the best path as long as it doesn't mess with usability.

Expecting an photo centric app to display text only post is really ridculous. What's thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app. With the same logic , why not complaining about mastodon only allowing micro blogging short text?

Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"?

Yes, if the mail provider is advertising the fact that they are dropping everything containing "P" AND if I'm currently not in the mood to read anything containing "P" AND if there are enough good alternative mail providers that do show me things containing "P".

What a weird take.

Does this person not understand how media specific sites work? If you want a mixed media website, there are plenty out there on the fediverse. Saying every site should host every media type gives users less options, not more.

The writing in this article it absolutely terrible. It needs some serious clean-up before the message isn't impaired by the medium.

I think OP has a valid point - it's not about experienced users, but newcomers to the fediverse, who may think they are following an account, when actually they only see a small part of it - there could be some indication of what's missing.

That the fact you can’t see boosts/reposts on Pixelfed.social is way worse than that and yet nobody seems to care

The Fediverse has plenty of problems but...this ain't it.

A bigger problem would be the inevitable outcome of what happened with Instagram; people just post pictures of text to get more reach (and probably also to circumvent Mastodon's stupid character limits).

It's a stupid and arbitrary limitation, but I digress.

I do not see Pixelfed dominating anything. I have been using the Fediverse for years now, but only recently I applied to a Pixelfed instance. The first instance I applied to - I am still awaiting approval. The second instance I joined did not require approval to join, however, the 1st photo I posted was met with this message; "You (sic) recent post been unlisted. Click here for more info." (link w/ vague instruction) The 2nd pic I posted made it through. All in all, I am not seeing this as a viable option if it is so hard to use/join/post...