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> your favorite artists and photographers on Pixelfed Pixelfed is more or less an Instagram clone ... which is like photo/video microblogging. Because the audi

> your favorite artists and photographers on Pixelfed Pixelfed is more or less an Instagram clone ... which is like photo/video microblogging. Because the audience is largely 'casual' and encourage taking and consuming media from a smart phone it does some things with images that are antithetical to what a _good_ platform would be for artists. Instagram compresses the living hell out of images, it limits you to square and close-to-square dimensions, the color profile is stripped (I would assume you still can't even upload DCI-P3 photos from non-Apple platforms for whatever reason), and all license and metadata is stripped from the image. Most, if not all, of these issues have traveled to Pixelfed too. If it wasn't for the walled status and trying to gain 'casual' followers, I don't think artists would prefer the degradation of image options, quality, and metadata of Pixelfed/Instagram if they could be federated on a different, image-quality-focused platform. It's not without it's shortcomings, but Flickr better at this sort of thing and was talking of federation this week: https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1594945727255699457 https://twitter.com/DonMacAskill/status/1594945727255699457. Currently nothing in the Fediverse respects the media in the way a deviantArt, 500px, Flickr, et.al. type platform does.

mgerdts 4y ago
Presumably a pixelfed server could be configured to support full resolution raw images for their local users. The federated feed could push out the lower resolution images that are fine for viewing on phones. This would be a way for an ActivityPub service to work on a freemium model.
- toastal 4y ago
  I don't think you need to ship full-res images, it's that the compression and stripping should be turned down and formats like JPEG XL should be supported to push a high-quality-but-small-size image for consumption. The line between a photo and photography is vague, but folks' daily coffee photo probably doesn't need to have the compression dialed back a lot.
  - mgerdts 4y ago
    My point was that a pixelfed instance wouldn’t necessarily need to reduce the size or quality of images if those that were uploading them were bearing the cost of storage and data transfers. I said raw because I am far from enough of a photography geek to suggest something else that would be ridiculous for casual viewing on a phone but a reasonable request for someone that will do something interesting with photos they download.

mgerdts 4y ago

Presumably a pixelfed server could be configured to support full resolution raw images for their local users. The federated feed could push out the lower resolution images that are fine for viewing on phones. This would be a way for an ActivityPub service to work on a freemium model.

toastal 4y ago
I don't think you need to ship full-res images, it's that the compression and stripping should be turned down and formats like JPEG XL should be supported to push a high-quality-but-small-size image for consumption. The line between a photo and photography is vague, but folks' daily coffee photo probably doesn't need to have the compression dialed back a lot.
- mgerdts 4y ago
  My point was that a pixelfed instance wouldn’t necessarily need to reduce the size or quality of images if those that were uploading them were bearing the cost of storage and data transfers. I said raw because I am far from enough of a photography geek to suggest something else that would be ridiculous for casual viewing on a phone but a reasonable request for someone that will do something interesting with photos they download.