The decentralized Instagram alternative is a great option if you want to back up your feed, focus on photo-sharing, or cut loose from Meta's empire entirely. And making the leap is surprisingly easy.
My personal observation is that people have been fed up for quite a while, not so much by the Instagram app itself but by Meta's brand, their untrustworthiness and the general vapid and scammy nature of the hordes of Influencers and "hustlers". It's just regular folks aren't aware of decent alternatives or the alternatives aren't quite there yet.
It's a platform still in its infancy but improving rapidly, social.photo is a pretty good one if you want a smaller instance, it's hosted by the admin over at discuss.online. I'm not a member of discuss.online but I can vouch that @[email protected] is an awesome sysadmin and I have full faith in him maintaining that instance long term (if you're ever worried of signing up to a small instance and it disappearing.. I highly doubt his stuff will.). Currently migration isn't added into pixelfed yet (its being worked on though) but I am gonna sign up to that one anyway, it's always best to spread around the federation.
Might be worth reaching out to lemmy.ca admins though and seeing if they have one spun up or would be willing to as well.
Yes, but things can change. Stories of Mastodon and Lemmy are inspiring. When Reddit backslash happened, Lemmy was already there as a good alternative for people to switch to. So was the case of Mastodon with the Twitter exodus. It's good that we've Pixelfed, it may be just a matter of time.
I'm on pixelfed, and truthfully, the lack of professional grade photos there are what actually made it great for me. I want to see ordinary photos from ordinary people. Taken during their ordinary day to day life.
Someone give me a hard sell here! Why should I use this app? I used to use Instagram (photographer/cinematographer), and I stopped using it because not just the tracking and all of that, but frankly, the content itself. Not to mention the algorithms are so busted and all they do is show me rage bait or flagrant ads disguised as content I would actually care about.
In my experience it is very much focused around photography, similar to Instagram when it was still good. The lack of algorithms pushing bullshit makes the feed feel much more organic, showing the people you follow - and there are already, in my experience, a healthy amount of talented people sharing interesting content.
Then again, I appreciate nature photography, so I'm not hard to satisfy.
Of all the social media I've been on over the years, I don't think any of them have given me less joy and more frustration than Instagram. Anything's better than that garbage.
Ive been using Pixelfed since late June quite happily. Iβve never used stories, but it looks like they have them if thatβs something that interests you:
The photo app that is terrible at telling me what is NSFW and what isn't.
Literally, I had a picture on Pixelfed that was marked NSFW and opening it revealed a fucking tree.
Then I scroll down and I think, "oh it is another NSFW tree." No it was an image of two people fucking." I don't care if there is porn but the algorithm to determine what porn is on Pixelfed is shit. Make it work better or just give me a damn toggle to turn it all off.
Yes it is the user who toggles whether their posts are NSFW or not. Clearly OP here is just repeating something they thought they heard and has no experience in using pixelfed.
Someone give me a hard sell here! Why should I use this app? I used to use Instagram (photographer/cinematographer), and I stopped using it because not just the tracking and all of that, but frankly, the content itself. Not to mention the algorithms are so busted and all they do is show me rage bait or flagrant ads disguised as content I would actually care about.
As with all the fediverse stuff, it feels like early Instagram when you weren't bombarded by a million ads and celebrity bullshit all the time. It feels like a great community of amateur photographers coming together to share and be inspired again to take photos. That's why I like it.
You know, one the one hand, I really want to support the Fediverse. But on the other hand, too much social media is bad. So it's kind of a balancing act.
I think the big sell for this is for privacyminded individuals who want to ensure that nobody will ever see the content they upload. It's more akin to cloud storage than a social network.
Ok, yet another fediverse copy of a previous app where none of the people/things I want to follow are at...at least Mastodon has bird.makeup which clones twitter accounts so I can still see the people I follow who don't use Mastodon.
Does Pixelfed have a version of that for Instagram?