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If you're looking for a self-hosted/decentralized Instagram alternative, there's also pixelfed.org, a very active project which supports ActivityPub. This means

If you're looking for a self-hosted/decentralized Instagram alternative, there's also pixelfed.org, a very active project which supports ActivityPub. This means that people can follow your "Instagram" (really Pixelfed) stream from their "Twitter" (really Mastodon) account.

drcongo 7y ago
I keep looking at Pixelfed, and even as a relatively technical person, I have absolutely no idea how to get going with it. Right now, go to pixelfed.org and there's a "Join" button in the top right corner, click on that and there's a message telling me "To join Pixelfed, you need to pick an instance. You can find a list of instances on the sites below." - click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. At this point I always give up.
- netsharc 7y ago
  > click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. Hah, you're right, you end up in some slow-loading dashboard (hooray fancy graphed realtime numbers!). I clicked on a random hostname, it's another dashboard page with the hostname in large, the same hostname as a link as a subtitle. I clicked the link, and hey, it's a page that looks like Instagram's sign up page, with the difference being that this one says: "Registrations are closed." I tried a few more sites, even the one with the most number of users, and they all say this. Only the 5th site I clicked on allows me to register. Ah only now do I notice the column "Open Signups" in their fancy dashboard...
  - eitland 7y ago
    The author very actively try to avoid centralizing it which may explain why all big instances has signups closed.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Yes, it's still early days for them so signing up isn't as easy as it can be. It's very usable already, though.
rickosborne 7y ago
But it's worth noting that Pixelfed is intended to be your own walled garden - there's no "here's my public photo stream" configuration. It's intended more like a friends-and-family thing. That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  What do you mean? Here's my public photo stream: https://pixelfed.social/stavros https://pixelfed.social/stavros You can even follow me from your instance. You can't get more public than that.
  - rickosborne 7y ago
    Hey, they fixed it! It's amazing what 2 months can do. The previous version had some pretty borked handling of public timelines. Having said that, it still requires a bit of hackery. There's no way to get rid of the home/landing page if there's the one user account, so you have to do a bit of php/apache/nginx/whatever magic to redirect past it to your user timeline.
atomi 7y ago
Looks like PHP.

drcongo 7y ago

I keep looking at Pixelfed, and even as a relatively technical person, I have absolutely no idea how to get going with it. Right now, go to pixelfed.org and there's a "Join" button in the top right corner, click on that and there's a message telling me "To join Pixelfed, you need to pick an instance. You can find a list of instances on the sites below." - click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. At this point I always give up.

netsharc 7y ago
> click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. Hah, you're right, you end up in some slow-loading dashboard (hooray fancy graphed realtime numbers!). I clicked on a random hostname, it's another dashboard page with the hostname in large, the same hostname as a link as a subtitle. I clicked the link, and hey, it's a page that looks like Instagram's sign up page, with the difference being that this one says: "Registrations are closed." I tried a few more sites, even the one with the most number of users, and they all say this. Only the 5th site I clicked on allows me to register. Ah only now do I notice the column "Open Signups" in their fancy dashboard...
- eitland 7y ago
  The author very actively try to avoid centralizing it which may explain why all big instances has signups closed.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Yes, it's still early days for them so signing up isn't as easy as it can be. It's very usable already, though.

rickosborne 7y ago

But it's worth noting that Pixelfed is intended to be your own walled garden - there's no "here's my public photo stream" configuration. It's intended more like a friends-and-family thing. That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.

StavrosK 7y ago
What do you mean? Here's my public photo stream: https://pixelfed.social/stavros https://pixelfed.social/stavros You can even follow me from your instance. You can't get more public than that.
- rickosborne 7y ago
  Hey, they fixed it! It's amazing what 2 months can do. The previous version had some pretty borked handling of public timelines. Having said that, it still requires a bit of hackery. There's no way to get rid of the home/landing page if there's the one user account, so you have to do a bit of php/apache/nginx/whatever magic to redirect past it to your user timeline.

atomi 7y ago

Looks like PHP.