Unauthoritative Pronouncements

I’ve been very conscious of how much I use Instagram. I deactivated my Facebook account many years ago, and I don’t use any other Meta products, but for a variety of reasons Instagram’s still there.

What Do I Use It For?

It’s the primary venue for finding out about what’s happening in the lives of friends and family —that might sound familiar because that was allegedly what Facebook was for. It’s also a place where I can find relevant information on a business or restaurant —how many other people checked a restaurant’s Instagram to see if they had special holiday hours, or menus for this past holiday season? Most important of all, it’s a place where I can go to see photos of nice architecture, cute dogs, and an algorithmic spray of filler.

I seldom post to Instagram, unless something good, and visually interesting is going on. My Instagram has been private for many years. The prospect of strangers liking a photo I took is less appealing than battling bots and spammers.

The place where I socialize on social media is Mastodon. It used to be Twitter two years ago. I want to figure out what to replace Instagram with, just like I did with Twitter.

Some people socialize through Instagram Stories, but not me. I’ll watch the things to find out what’s happening, but it’s really more of an inbox than an outbox.

Why Do I Want to Leave?

Mark Zuckerberg has proven himself, time and time again, to be unscrupulous. He’s got no scruples. Not a single scruple. Scruples see Mark and hide.

He responds to external pressures on his company by complying with what he thinks will make people ease-up, or respond more favorably to the company. There’s no shortage of news about the changes that are being made right now. None of the changes are good, or even neutral.

One thing I didn’t mention above is that Instagram wants ad dollars and engagement (more ads). It profiles users not just to match ads to, but it attempts to match posts, and reels to as well. Any gay man on Instagram has been served up a bevy of thirst traps in sponsored posts, and the Explore tab. Meta is very comfortable monetizing LGBTQ+ users, even though they are quick to sell them out.

The worst outcomes of Zuckerberg’s policy changes won’t be immediate, and other cis, gay men might think they’ll just wait around and see how bad it gets, but we should all have learned a valuable lesson already about these social platforms.

What I’m Looking For

The replacement should be a federated network (likely fediverse) with data portability. I don’t want to invest in a closed social network ever again. That means no Glass, or Retro.

Pixelfed was not something I felt compelled to try previously because it was web-only and felt very much like a Linux app clone of a Windows app. Today, they launched their iOS app so I finally signed up to give it a go.

It has some bugs and isn’t really ready to take on Instagram right this minute. The app flat out ate two posts I tried to make without even serving an error message. The photo selector only lets you pick one photo at a time to attach. It doesn’t faithfully preview the attached images. It doesn’t seem to have any HDR support. The app can’t upload videos, but the web site can. You can’t upload images from your Camera app via a Share Sheet extension.

Some of the bugs, and shortcomings of the new Pixelfed iOS app can be routed around by using Ivory (thanks for the tip). Ivory logs into pixelfed just like a Mastodon account. It can’t attach as many photos to a post as the Pixelfed app or site can, but it worked for posting four photos, and didn’t eat the post like the app and site did.

The biggest problem, as a photo-centric network and app, is that the uploaded photos are low-res and compressed to hell. I know that media storage and bandwidth are expensive, but there isn’t any kind of “pay more for full quality” option like you’d have with Flickr’s freemium model.

To go along with that, it’s got the same problem Mastodon has. The main server, pixelfed.social, is taking the brunt of new sign-ups. Just like mastodon.social takes the brunt of new Mastodon sign-ups. It is extremely unclear which community server to join. When I mentioned this on Mastodon I was chided for not setting up my account on gram.social run by Stux the admin of mstdn.social, but… how could I be expected to know any of that to make a decision about account creation?

The server problem on Mastodon was solved when some of my friends banded together to get managed Mastodon hosting from masto.host. We have duck.haus for our Mastodon server needs, and don’t have to worry about having a second career as a server admin. I don’t see managed hosting options for Pixelfed right now (my duckduckgo search turned up one from elestio, but I didn’t see any other mentions of them so I’m not confident enough to give them a spin).

It also has an issue that’s typical of Mastodon as well. I can’t specify a “close friends” group. I can post something that only followers can see, but then I’m back to individually screening my followers to figure out how much personal information, like photos of family members, I want people I don’t know very well to have access to.

Lastly, Pixelfed.org, and Pixelfed.social are owned by Daniel Supernault, in a very similar way to how WordPress.org and WordPress.com are Matt Mullenweg’s. That gives me pause because Daniel has posted some things that didn’t fill me with confidence about him running a thing I’m investing my time into. There was apparently a dust-up as recently as two weeks ago over Loops (Daniel’s fediverse TikTok clone) that was mostly deleted. Daniel did leave up a poll on Mastodon.

So many ppl want me to quit or otherwise not participate in the fediverse.

Do you agree?

That… is not inspiring.

Like WordPress, if things ever got bad people can take stuff and go, but that portability doesn’t mean that it’s going to be smooth, and drama free —look at Matt again.

Why Not Mastodon?

While I was able to use Ivory to post to Pixelfed, and while I have managed hosting for Mastodon, Mastodon and Ivory are not made for Image galleries, and their social feeds are not optimized to show you that media exclusively. I’m a big believer in siloing what I’m doing by app.

Having said all of that, Pixelfed is currently the frontrunner, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot else in this field that I am aware of. I’m hopeful that if someone starts up a dependable, managed-hosting business that it will help. Possibly another iOS app, too.