12 ms·

Pixelfed Introduces Import from Instagram

230 points by rapnie 3y ago

2Gkashmiri 3y ago
nice
ZacnyLos 3y ago
Gamechanger
thih9 3y ago
> Update your Pixelfed app or access the web version to take advantage of this groundbreaking feature today! Impressive. I also appreciate supporting both web and app version. Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about how it worked it practice.
- ZacnyLos 3y ago
  I have to admit their UX and UI are superior among all fediverse apps.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about how it worked it practice. Just tried it but it's not a direct import - it's "dump your data from Instagram as JSON[1] and we'll import that JSON". i.e. a one-off backup restore. (If ActivityPub allowed backdated posts, I'd do the sync myself from my instaloader downloads but alas, most servers do not.) [1] "It may take up to 14 days to collect this information and send it to you."
  - Stephen304 3y ago
    It looks like the instagram->pixelfed import actually preserves the original post's date. Dansup imported a post from 2016 and it shows up as "7y ago" in my mastodon UI.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      Oh yeah, if you have direct access to the database / backend admin (as I'm sure this importer does), you can frob things to get the correct dates and avoid pushing them out as new posts. Just not possible via the standard APIs at the moment (I had to patch my Akkoma to allow backfilling of posts from certain accounts.)
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Got my download - 2.4GB. Uploaded it - Safari chugs badly here. If you leave that tab at all, it breaks and restarts which cancels the import process. Once it's uploaded the file, Pixelfed wants you to tap each image you want to import in a 3-wide scrolling grid and there's no "select all" I can see. Plus it is now DOG SLOW. I have 9052 Instagram posts. Bugger that, frankly, because I'm not spending upwards of 3 hours clicking on a web page to import photos. In summary - nice idea badly implemented. [edit: Tried it in Chrome. Upload is much smoother and more reliable but still no "select all" and it still chugs like a 1970s PC - a good 30s between clicking and the image being selected.]
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Nothing in ActivityPub cares about whether a post is back dated. How would it even know? Maybe it's just an old post.
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      Apologies, should have been clearer that it's the MastoAPI which has no concept of backdated posts - or even of creating dated posts at all. [1] has no `created_at` or any other (useful) timestamp. Hence having to local-patch my Akkoma to allow passing `created_at` for my backfill needs. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
- james_pm 3y ago
  Trying it now...it will only let you import 100 photos at a time, and you need to single select each one (My Instagram has hundreds and hundreds of photos going back a decade). So far nothing has actually imported. Not sure how long I should wait.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > it will only let you import 100 photos at a time Oh bloody hell. I've got no hope with my 9k photos then. I appreciate the effort from Pixelfed but they need to clarify their messaging from "Import From Instagram" to "Partial Restore From Instagram With A Terrible UX".
Croftengea 3y ago
TIL Pixelfed exists. It's a pretty small network though, they say they have 163K users. They need some stupid Instagram policy change to get more traction.
- mxuribe 3y ago
  With all due respect, I'm going to nitpick a portion of your comment there... While the 163k users might accurately describe pixelfed...that is, pixelfed users, that doesn't even begin to describe "the network"... which is composed of millions of fediverse users. Your comment was like saying that email is not that big of a network because there are only X numbers of thunderbird users. Again, all due respect. But pixelfed is only one of many ways to be present on, and interact with millions of people on the fediverse. ;-)
  - Croftengea 3y ago
    Point taken, thanks for explaining!
    - mxuribe 3y ago
      All good! :-). If you wish to learn more about the wider fediverse, check out this page: https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fediverse/ https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fed... And if that goes too deep too soon, then the home page of the same site can help provide a brief primer. Of course with the fediverse gaining recent attention (due to mastodon and pixelfed), there are plenty of other guides out there as well. Good luck!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- rglullis 3y ago
  No. Pixelfed is part of the Fediverse. You can follow anyone and be followed from Mastodon, Pleroma. This means that we have already almost 10M users to interact with. [0] Stop thinking in terms of silos and start embracing the re-emergence of the World Wide Web. [0] https://fedidb.org/ https://fedidb.org/
yieldcrv 3y ago
> you can seamlessly transfer your photos, captions, and even hashtags that’s rich, given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to their feed in 2 years Its all in the ephemeral stories now, or the reels Too late
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to their feed in 2 years Well, let me throw my anecdata hat into this ring and point out that it is not "nobody" because I have a constantly refreshing feed of people posting just those things every day.
  - monsieurgaufre 3y ago
    He may be exagerating, but it is also my experience. The only "posts" i see are from entities that have something to sell. The "regular" users just do stories now (probably because of the disappearing nature of them). 2 anecdata, i guess.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      Yeah it was hyperbole based on that observation, I’m glad someone that can relate chimed in
- mym1990 3y ago
  Photos are alive and well on IG, not sure if you are thinking of a different app.
  - kredd 3y ago
    Depends on the generation, but it's "not cool" to post photos like we used to do it every week or so in my generation (younger millennials / older gen-z). I've seen some people doing once every month, quarter, or life altering events to give a big "fan out" news to their friends, but that's it.
Kab1r 3y ago
The thing that annoys me is that there is no propper way (at least to my knowledge) to run multiple linked fedi accounts. I have a selfhosted misskey instance, but then should I also run pixelfed? Or should I just use the singular instance?
- kevincox 3y ago
  I have the same problem. I would love to be able to toot from mastodon and post videos from PeerTube to the same account. Right now it is very segmented, even though most fediverse apps can process incoming posts of various formats (so you can follow PeerTube users from Mastodon no problem) but you can only post a limited set of content. They have mixed identity and applications.
  - iameli 3y ago
    This is where the Web3 ecosystem is ahead right now. One address, log into a hundred different apps with the same wallet identity.
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Everyone just has multiple accounts, but I'd say it still works better than having separate twitter, instagram, reddit, and youtube accounts. You may need a peertube account to post a video, but just about anyone can comment if they like. Can't comment on a youtube video from twitter.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    To be fair, you can comment on a Twitter video from Twitter :-)
- 3np 3y ago
  I've been toying around with the idea of an ActivityPub proxy/aggregator/delegation which would "front" all your services and act as a unified identity for the proxied instances. It would inherently require trust, so the only way it would scale beyond self-hosters controlling their own domain would be co-hosted alongside some SSO-unified fedi services (or if S2S delegation becomes an adopted thing). (If you run with this idea, consider AGPL for all parts :))
xnx 3y ago
I'm a big fan of liberating data (especially my own!) from walled gardens, but I have to assume that whatever they're doing is against Instagram's terms and Instagram will do everything to stop/break this.
- naillo 3y ago
  The startup strategy of knowingly breaking laws for brand awareness and picking up some users like this and then removing it once you get caught.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    They have an app that federates with ActivityPub/Mastadon, not a startup (that I have seen).
  - zeruch 3y ago
    I guess its good they arent a startup then?
- hbn 3y ago
  From what I read in another comment, it takes advantage of the data export function Instagram themselves offer
- not2b 3y ago
  It would appear that you assume incorrectly. Instagram will let you dump all your data into a JSON. All Pixelfed is doing is reading that JSON. Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that would block them from reading in that JSON.
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    > Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that would block them from reading in that JSON. I think they're using OAuth to connect the accounts, and I believe Meta requires developers click through some agreement to do that. Edit: I was wrong, see below.
davidmurdoch 3y ago
The captcha to sign up shows AI-generated images and asks things like "select images of a dog" but there are zero dogs, just dog approximations. I really hope these identifications won't be used as training data.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- infinityio 3y ago
  hCaptcha has been doing this for a few months now to my knowledge - I'm guessing this is being used to train a CLIP-like system (or alternatively: it might just be that poorly generated ai images are the best candidate for a captcha in the age of modern subject recognition, it's hard to know)
  - neltnerb 3y ago
    I mentioned noticing it several months ago, but it sounded like others hadn't seen it yet. It's always hcaptcha (or at least the atrocious ones are, maybe the others are just super good). I have the same thought at first, it's really amusing to think that they expect me to select silly wrong things to pass a test and mistrain their system. I like to hope. Alas, statistically they can totally do this by showing the same images to multiple people so that they can estimate what most people like and then define a threshold outside which they predict that it's not a human. One dimension is related to their AI tuning variables or whatever, the other is related to their analog signal from human measurements of the same images. They surely do this already since humans also have noise in their responses to a survey with anything that's not obvious. They can still apply on-off thresholding to the analog signal that is a survey over many participants. It still gives these ridiculous gas-lighting training systems though. One thing that's probably true -- they're finding out what the lowest quality image is that people will identify as something, which is unique. Usually people vote for what they like best, but if the stupid thing forces you to click on a certain number they can adjust that threshold. Maybe they intend to touch up subsections of images such that they're closer to these minimum quality thresholds, who knows... just something different.
- 3y ago
greedo 3y ago
I've been using Pixelfed since I discovered it after Elon bought Twitter. It's helped me get back into photography and I post daily. Of course the userbase is tiny compared to Insta, but I don't care.
- zeruch 3y ago
  I'd rather grown a small but sincerely interested community around my work, than a large, mostly indifferent one. When I was still active on DeviantArt regularly, but before I got Gallery Director status (2004-2008 ish) I sold little prints, but consistently. After GD, I overall sold about double, but the interaction was like an EKG, and full of noise and stupid complaints and random stats-whoring from commenters. It felt like too much of a rollercoaster managing whatever turdstorm may or may not arise. I'm still trying to bootstrap a regular pace with PF, as I'm still a very active IG user, but I may just test out if the Import function can handle JSON file with over 10K posts...
  - greedo 3y ago
    Yeah, I joke with my daughters that I have EIGHT followers, and my financial windfall is just around the corner. I used to do quite a bit of photog and even majored in visarts, but lost interest until recently. Nice to have something simple like daily posting reinvigorate an old interest. It's like writers who have to write every day. After a while you get decent at it.
    - zeruch 3y ago
      I started posting my art online 20 years ago with DeviantArt and my original blogging efforts, but it was predicated on the fact that I had an art practice for my own edification, so the online part just became an adjunct aspect. I was "gonna art" regardless, so why not syndicate what that is, regardless of what it generates. Keeping that attitude has been healthy in terms of what I produce, but I do find that I would prefer to be using a service that allows for some actual community elements, which DevArt has allowed to go fallow, and other sites never quite had (e.g. Society6) but at least have good artist services (e.g. prints)
nfriedly 3y ago
That's awesome, congrats Pixelfed team! The next thing I'd like to see is a way to make it ongoing - specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup of my wife's Instagram account. She posts a lot of things that are relevant to our family, and it'd be nice to know we'll still have it even if something were to happen to her account. It also sounds like Stories are not currently imported. That makes sense for a one-time import since they are meant to be ephemeral, but for an ongoing importer/backup, it would be nice to capture those as well.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup of my wife's Instagram account. Instaloader is pretty good for backing up Instagram accounts but it's easy to trigger Instagram's anti-bot protections using it. I use a secondary account to avoid locking out my main and even then it took ~4 days to download my 9k posts because of the lockouts and rate-limiting. But once you've got the main bulk down, you can run it once a day to fill in anything new and that's pretty reliable.
  - nfriedly 3y ago
    Thanks, I'll try that out.
dchuk 3y ago
I feel like all of these decentralized attempts to respond to the ills of social media/social products are going to never make it out of the curious POC phase simply because the vast vast majority of people do not care about hosting their own instances or owning their data to that degree. When it comes down to it, there are 3 key issues with the "traditional" model of social products: You are the product - This is true of 1) your data you put into the system explicitly, 2) the data you create by using the system, and 3) the predominant business model (ads) of these products. This could be fixed by: 1) some easy means to extract all data you create in an accessible format (only some users will care about this) 2 & 3) Allowing people the choice of whether they are the product or not. "Subscribe for no ads" seems like a good middle path alternative to selling ads without demanding a whole new architecture and operational model for federated solutions. Separate of the above ideas is the fact that social products are really addiction mechanisms. Reddit/Hacker News/Tik Tok/Instagram are all heavily optimized to addict their users to their product. This is, in my opinion, where the real risk lies overall, because it is directly leading to aggressive micro feedback loops and information bubbles that are evolving faster than humans can process. I'm not sure what to do about this problem save for outright control/limitation attempts, which seems like a guaranteed mess.
- interroboink 3y ago
  While I am also not very bullish on any fedi-xyz that requires special extra effort from users, I think there's another problem with the current popular schemes that makes your (2&3) solution problematic: money incentives, over time. Even if a company today were to offer "subscribe for no ads", I don't have especially great confidence that it will stay that way, or that the quality of the product will be maintained over time. Fundamentally, if you have a situation where making money is the goal (whether via ads or subscriptions, etc), then that is the goal that will be pursued. But a healthy community is not about money. One way to "keep the money-grubbing company honest", as it were, is to have genuine competition. Maybe there are other good ways, but that's at least one. There needs to be an existential threat to that company, at all times, that its users (and thus revenue) could leave and go somewhere else. A federated approach at least somewhat pushes things in that direction. I'm curious to see how much traction it gains. Maybe there could be a non-profit approach. Or maybe "online community as a public utility" approach; I really don't know. But the money-driven incentive tends to be a slow poison, I think.
andrewshadura 3y ago
Countdown to Instagram banning this: 9… 8… 7…
- ZacnyLos 3y ago
  Insta has to comply with European law.
ktosobcy 3y ago
I wanted to use pixelfed (for my personal needs) but discovered there is no easily deployable docker image so I gave up... shame.
- mariusor 3y ago
  What is preventing you from creating one?
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    Well, I tried building pixelfed and ran into problems. I tried to follow reported, docker related issues on their github but without much luck. There was a momentum and even PR to create an image but it somewhat got stuck. tl,dr; not skilled enough in this particular toolstack to get it working.
yosito 3y ago
Cool feature. But the blog post neglects to mention how to find and use it.
FalconSensei 3y ago
My worry is that it is expensive to host and serve images with decent speed. I wouldn't have pixelfed as my main image sharing platform, purely because you'll need quite some money to keep it running, and without monetization - considering a lot of people just wanna post and not pay - not sure how it will survive in the long term
AnonC 3y ago
Tangential caution to anyone wanting to try Pixelfed. Host your own instance and post on it. The official pixelfed.social is no better than Instagram in banning accounts for no reason except that the main developer of Pixelfed (who is also the admin of that instance) thinks of something as spam without reading and without issuing warnings or any indications. Unlike Instagram, which at least has an appeals process (in theory), he doesn’t respond to emails and doesn’t respond to queries sent through other platforms where he’s active either. I learned it the hard way that whether you choose a centralized platform or decentralized platform, you’re at the mercy of algorithms or someone’s emotions and trigger happy fingers. Your data is never your data when you’re on someone else’s hosted platform.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > Host your own [Pixelfed] instance and post on it. I'm leaning towards that but hoping that someone comes out with a more resource-friendly implementation (hopefully based on Rust or Elixir with SQLite database.)
dchest 3y ago
I tried it. You have to click on each photo you want to import. Maximum 100 photos, but you can "re-upload" the zip file and click on another batch of 100 photos. Then they are processing for a long time (which is understandable). The next morning — nothing happened, import disappeared, photos didn't appear.

230 points by rapnie 3y ago

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

nice

ZacnyLos 3y ago

Gamechanger

thih9 3y ago

> Update your Pixelfed app or access the web version to take advantage of this groundbreaking feature today! Impressive. I also appreciate supporting both web and app version. Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about how it worked it practice.

ZacnyLos 3y ago
I have to admit their UX and UI are superior among all fediverse apps.
zimpenfish 3y ago
> Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about how it worked it practice. Just tried it but it's not a direct import - it's "dump your data from Instagram as JSON[1] and we'll import that JSON". i.e. a one-off backup restore. (If ActivityPub allowed backdated posts, I'd do the sync myself from my instaloader downloads but alas, most servers do not.) [1] "It may take up to 14 days to collect this information and send it to you."
- Stephen304 3y ago
  It looks like the instagram->pixelfed import actually preserves the original post's date. Dansup imported a post from 2016 and it shows up as "7y ago" in my mastodon UI.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Oh yeah, if you have direct access to the database / backend admin (as I'm sure this importer does), you can frob things to get the correct dates and avoid pushing them out as new posts. Just not possible via the standard APIs at the moment (I had to patch my Akkoma to allow backfilling of posts from certain accounts.)
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  Got my download - 2.4GB. Uploaded it - Safari chugs badly here. If you leave that tab at all, it breaks and restarts which cancels the import process. Once it's uploaded the file, Pixelfed wants you to tap each image you want to import in a 3-wide scrolling grid and there's no "select all" I can see. Plus it is now DOG SLOW. I have 9052 Instagram posts. Bugger that, frankly, because I'm not spending upwards of 3 hours clicking on a web page to import photos. In summary - nice idea badly implemented. [edit: Tried it in Chrome. Upload is much smoother and more reliable but still no "select all" and it still chugs like a 1970s PC - a good 30s between clicking and the image being selected.]
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Nothing in ActivityPub cares about whether a post is back dated. How would it even know? Maybe it's just an old post.
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    Apologies, should have been clearer that it's the MastoAPI which has no concept of backdated posts - or even of creating dated posts at all. [1] has no `created_at` or any other (useful) timestamp. Hence having to local-patch my Akkoma to allow passing `created_at` for my backfill needs. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
james_pm 3y ago
Trying it now...it will only let you import 100 photos at a time, and you need to single select each one (My Instagram has hundreds and hundreds of photos going back a decade). So far nothing has actually imported. Not sure how long I should wait.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > it will only let you import 100 photos at a time Oh bloody hell. I've got no hope with my 9k photos then. I appreciate the effort from Pixelfed but they need to clarify their messaging from "Import From Instagram" to "Partial Restore From Instagram With A Terrible UX".

Croftengea 3y ago

TIL Pixelfed exists. It's a pretty small network though, they say they have 163K users. They need some stupid Instagram policy change to get more traction.

mxuribe 3y ago
With all due respect, I'm going to nitpick a portion of your comment there... While the 163k users might accurately describe pixelfed...that is, pixelfed users, that doesn't even begin to describe "the network"... which is composed of millions of fediverse users. Your comment was like saying that email is not that big of a network because there are only X numbers of thunderbird users. Again, all due respect. But pixelfed is only one of many ways to be present on, and interact with millions of people on the fediverse. ;-)
- Croftengea 3y ago
  Point taken, thanks for explaining!
  - mxuribe 3y ago
    All good! :-). If you wish to learn more about the wider fediverse, check out this page: https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fediverse/ https://fedi.tips/what-other-kinds-of-servers-are-on-the-fed... And if that goes too deep too soon, then the home page of the same site can help provide a brief primer. Of course with the fediverse gaining recent attention (due to mastodon and pixelfed), there are plenty of other guides out there as well. Good luck!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rglullis 3y ago
No. Pixelfed is part of the Fediverse. You can follow anyone and be followed from Mastodon, Pleroma. This means that we have already almost 10M users to interact with. [0] Stop thinking in terms of silos and start embracing the re-emergence of the World Wide Web. [0] https://fedidb.org/ https://fedidb.org/

yieldcrv 3y ago

> you can seamlessly transfer your photos, captions, and even hashtags that’s rich, given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to their feed in 2 years Its all in the ephemeral stories now, or the reels Too late

zimpenfish 3y ago
> given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to their feed in 2 years Well, let me throw my anecdata hat into this ring and point out that it is not "nobody" because I have a constantly refreshing feed of people posting just those things every day.
- monsieurgaufre 3y ago
  He may be exagerating, but it is also my experience. The only "posts" i see are from entities that have something to sell. The "regular" users just do stories now (probably because of the disappearing nature of them). 2 anecdata, i guess.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Yeah it was hyperbole based on that observation, I’m glad someone that can relate chimed in
mym1990 3y ago
Photos are alive and well on IG, not sure if you are thinking of a different app.
- kredd 3y ago
  Depends on the generation, but it's "not cool" to post photos like we used to do it every week or so in my generation (younger millennials / older gen-z). I've seen some people doing once every month, quarter, or life altering events to give a big "fan out" news to their friends, but that's it.

Kab1r 3y ago

The thing that annoys me is that there is no propper way (at least to my knowledge) to run multiple linked fedi accounts. I have a selfhosted misskey instance, but then should I also run pixelfed? Or should I just use the singular instance?

kevincox 3y ago
I have the same problem. I would love to be able to toot from mastodon and post videos from PeerTube to the same account. Right now it is very segmented, even though most fediverse apps can process incoming posts of various formats (so you can follow PeerTube users from Mastodon no problem) but you can only post a limited set of content. They have mixed identity and applications.
- iameli 3y ago
  This is where the Web3 ecosystem is ahead right now. One address, log into a hundred different apps with the same wallet identity.
tedunangst 3y ago
Everyone just has multiple accounts, but I'd say it still works better than having separate twitter, instagram, reddit, and youtube accounts. You may need a peertube account to post a video, but just about anyone can comment if they like. Can't comment on a youtube video from twitter.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  To be fair, you can comment on a Twitter video from Twitter :-)
3np 3y ago
I've been toying around with the idea of an ActivityPub proxy/aggregator/delegation which would "front" all your services and act as a unified identity for the proxied instances. It would inherently require trust, so the only way it would scale beyond self-hosters controlling their own domain would be co-hosted alongside some SSO-unified fedi services (or if S2S delegation becomes an adopted thing). (If you run with this idea, consider AGPL for all parts :))

xnx 3y ago

I'm a big fan of liberating data (especially my own!) from walled gardens, but I have to assume that whatever they're doing is against Instagram's terms and Instagram will do everything to stop/break this.

naillo 3y ago
The startup strategy of knowingly breaking laws for brand awareness and picking up some users like this and then removing it once you get caught.
- DANmode 3y ago
  They have an app that federates with ActivityPub/Mastadon, not a startup (that I have seen).
- zeruch 3y ago
  I guess its good they arent a startup then?
hbn 3y ago
From what I read in another comment, it takes advantage of the data export function Instagram themselves offer
not2b 3y ago
It would appear that you assume incorrectly. Instagram will let you dump all your data into a JSON. All Pixelfed is doing is reading that JSON. Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that would block them from reading in that JSON.
- nfriedly 3y ago
  > Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that would block them from reading in that JSON. I think they're using OAuth to connect the accounts, and I believe Meta requires developers click through some agreement to do that. Edit: I was wrong, see below.

davidmurdoch 3y ago

The captcha to sign up shows AI-generated images and asks things like "select images of a dog" but there are zero dogs, just dog approximations. I really hope these identifications won't be used as training data.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
infinityio 3y ago
hCaptcha has been doing this for a few months now to my knowledge - I'm guessing this is being used to train a CLIP-like system (or alternatively: it might just be that poorly generated ai images are the best candidate for a captcha in the age of modern subject recognition, it's hard to know)
- neltnerb 3y ago
  I mentioned noticing it several months ago, but it sounded like others hadn't seen it yet. It's always hcaptcha (or at least the atrocious ones are, maybe the others are just super good). I have the same thought at first, it's really amusing to think that they expect me to select silly wrong things to pass a test and mistrain their system. I like to hope. Alas, statistically they can totally do this by showing the same images to multiple people so that they can estimate what most people like and then define a threshold outside which they predict that it's not a human. One dimension is related to their AI tuning variables or whatever, the other is related to their analog signal from human measurements of the same images. They surely do this already since humans also have noise in their responses to a survey with anything that's not obvious. They can still apply on-off thresholding to the analog signal that is a survey over many participants. It still gives these ridiculous gas-lighting training systems though. One thing that's probably true -- they're finding out what the lowest quality image is that people will identify as something, which is unique. Usually people vote for what they like best, but if the stupid thing forces you to click on a certain number they can adjust that threshold. Maybe they intend to touch up subsections of images such that they're closer to these minimum quality thresholds, who knows... just something different.
3y ago

greedo 3y ago

I've been using Pixelfed since I discovered it after Elon bought Twitter. It's helped me get back into photography and I post daily. Of course the userbase is tiny compared to Insta, but I don't care.

zeruch 3y ago
I'd rather grown a small but sincerely interested community around my work, than a large, mostly indifferent one. When I was still active on DeviantArt regularly, but before I got Gallery Director status (2004-2008 ish) I sold little prints, but consistently. After GD, I overall sold about double, but the interaction was like an EKG, and full of noise and stupid complaints and random stats-whoring from commenters. It felt like too much of a rollercoaster managing whatever turdstorm may or may not arise. I'm still trying to bootstrap a regular pace with PF, as I'm still a very active IG user, but I may just test out if the Import function can handle JSON file with over 10K posts...
- greedo 3y ago
  Yeah, I joke with my daughters that I have EIGHT followers, and my financial windfall is just around the corner. I used to do quite a bit of photog and even majored in visarts, but lost interest until recently. Nice to have something simple like daily posting reinvigorate an old interest. It's like writers who have to write every day. After a while you get decent at it.
  - zeruch 3y ago
    I started posting my art online 20 years ago with DeviantArt and my original blogging efforts, but it was predicated on the fact that I had an art practice for my own edification, so the online part just became an adjunct aspect. I was "gonna art" regardless, so why not syndicate what that is, regardless of what it generates. Keeping that attitude has been healthy in terms of what I produce, but I do find that I would prefer to be using a service that allows for some actual community elements, which DevArt has allowed to go fallow, and other sites never quite had (e.g. Society6) but at least have good artist services (e.g. prints)

nfriedly 3y ago

That's awesome, congrats Pixelfed team! The next thing I'd like to see is a way to make it ongoing - specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup of my wife's Instagram account. She posts a lot of things that are relevant to our family, and it'd be nice to know we'll still have it even if something were to happen to her account. It also sounds like Stories are not currently imported. That makes sense for a one-time import since they are meant to be ephemeral, but for an ongoing importer/backup, it would be nice to capture those as well.

zimpenfish 3y ago
> specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup of my wife's Instagram account. Instaloader is pretty good for backing up Instagram accounts but it's easy to trigger Instagram's anti-bot protections using it. I use a secondary account to avoid locking out my main and even then it took ~4 days to download my 9k posts because of the lockouts and rate-limiting. But once you've got the main bulk down, you can run it once a day to fill in anything new and that's pretty reliable.
- nfriedly 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll try that out.

dchuk 3y ago

I feel like all of these decentralized attempts to respond to the ills of social media/social products are going to never make it out of the curious POC phase simply because the vast vast majority of people do not care about hosting their own instances or owning their data to that degree. When it comes down to it, there are 3 key issues with the "traditional" model of social products: You are the product - This is true of 1) your data you put into the system explicitly, 2) the data you create by using the system, and 3) the predominant business model (ads) of these products. This could be fixed by: 1) some easy means to extract all data you create in an accessible format (only some users will care about this) 2 & 3) Allowing people the choice of whether they are the product or not. "Subscribe for no ads" seems like a good middle path alternative to selling ads without demanding a whole new architecture and operational model for federated solutions. Separate of the above ideas is the fact that social products are really addiction mechanisms. Reddit/Hacker News/Tik Tok/Instagram are all heavily optimized to addict their users to their product. This is, in my opinion, where the real risk lies overall, because it is directly leading to aggressive micro feedback loops and information bubbles that are evolving faster than humans can process. I'm not sure what to do about this problem save for outright control/limitation attempts, which seems like a guaranteed mess.

interroboink 3y ago
While I am also not very bullish on any fedi-xyz that requires special extra effort from users, I think there's another problem with the current popular schemes that makes your (2&3) solution problematic: money incentives, over time. Even if a company today were to offer "subscribe for no ads", I don't have especially great confidence that it will stay that way, or that the quality of the product will be maintained over time. Fundamentally, if you have a situation where making money is the goal (whether via ads or subscriptions, etc), then that is the goal that will be pursued. But a healthy community is not about money. One way to "keep the money-grubbing company honest", as it were, is to have genuine competition. Maybe there are other good ways, but that's at least one. There needs to be an existential threat to that company, at all times, that its users (and thus revenue) could leave and go somewhere else. A federated approach at least somewhat pushes things in that direction. I'm curious to see how much traction it gains. Maybe there could be a non-profit approach. Or maybe "online community as a public utility" approach; I really don't know. But the money-driven incentive tends to be a slow poison, I think.

andrewshadura 3y ago

Countdown to Instagram banning this: 9… 8… 7…

ZacnyLos 3y ago
Insta has to comply with European law.

ktosobcy 3y ago

I wanted to use pixelfed (for my personal needs) but discovered there is no easily deployable docker image so I gave up... shame.

mariusor 3y ago
What is preventing you from creating one?
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  Well, I tried building pixelfed and ran into problems. I tried to follow reported, docker related issues on their github but without much luck. There was a momentum and even PR to create an image but it somewhat got stuck. tl,dr; not skilled enough in this particular toolstack to get it working.

yosito 3y ago

Cool feature. But the blog post neglects to mention how to find and use it.

FalconSensei 3y ago

My worry is that it is expensive to host and serve images with decent speed. I wouldn't have pixelfed as my main image sharing platform, purely because you'll need quite some money to keep it running, and without monetization - considering a lot of people just wanna post and not pay - not sure how it will survive in the long term

AnonC 3y ago

Tangential caution to anyone wanting to try Pixelfed. Host your own instance and post on it. The official pixelfed.social is no better than Instagram in banning accounts for no reason except that the main developer of Pixelfed (who is also the admin of that instance) thinks of something as spam without reading and without issuing warnings or any indications. Unlike Instagram, which at least has an appeals process (in theory), he doesn’t respond to emails and doesn’t respond to queries sent through other platforms where he’s active either. I learned it the hard way that whether you choose a centralized platform or decentralized platform, you’re at the mercy of algorithms or someone’s emotions and trigger happy fingers. Your data is never your data when you’re on someone else’s hosted platform.

zimpenfish 3y ago
> Host your own [Pixelfed] instance and post on it. I'm leaning towards that but hoping that someone comes out with a more resource-friendly implementation (hopefully based on Rust or Elixir with SQLite database.)

dchest 3y ago

I tried it. You have to click on each photo you want to import. Maximum 100 photos, but you can "re-upload" the zip file and click on another batch of 100 photos. Then they are processing for a long time (which is understandable). The next morning — nothing happened, import disappeared, photos didn't appear.