Episode: 3220
Title: HPR3220: PixelFed
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3220/hpr3220.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:02:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,220 for Friday 4 December 2020. Today's show is entitled,
PixelFed,
and is part of the series' social media, it is hosted by Ahuka
and is about 20 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is
a look at a federated alternative to Instagram.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to HPR15.com.
Welcome to HPR15.com.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode.
And I'm going to continue with our series on better social media.
I'm going to introduce another one to you this time,
and this is something called PixelFed.
And I want to give a shout out at the beginning of my buddy,
Murf, who helped me in doing the research on this
and answering some questions that I had.
The PixelFed is a photo sharing service similar to Instagram.
But if Instagram exists and is widely used, why do we need PixelFed?
I would answer that by pointing out that Instagram is owned by Facebook.
And so it is part of the surveillance capitalist realm of social media.
PixelFed, by contrast, is part of the decentralized Fediverse,
where no one is trying to monetize your data.
And speaking of data in a federated platform,
there is no incentive to hack the system for your data
since the data of all users is distributed over many independent servers.
That is part of the definition of federated after all.
And PixelFed uses the activity pub protocol for sharing,
which is a big plus in my book.
I've already shared a lot about why I think activity pub,
which is a worldwide web consortium recommendation,
is the best way for federated social media to allow for messages
to be passed from server to server.
When given a choice between platforms,
I will always lean to the one that uses activity pub.
Now what is PixelFed?
PixelFed is a photo sharing platform that lets you share photos
either one at a time or in small groups called albums.
It is, add free.
There are no ads in your timelines or anywhere.
It is chronological.
Your photos are shared in the order they are posted.
There are no algorithms getting in the way.
After all, with no ads, what would be the point for algorithms?
You are in charge of your posts in your timeline,
not a money-grubbing service.
It is privacy-focused.
No one is tracking you on PixelFed.
No third party analytics are packaging your data
for the non-existent advertising.
It is just you and your friends, as it should be.
So what does PixelFed do?
It has some basic capabilities that you would expect in a platform like this.
You can discover new content and creators.
You can share your photos one post at a time.
You can create albums alternatively.
These are usually limited.
For instance, PixelFed.social
Limits albums to 10 photos
and picksfed.com limits albums to 4 photos.
So in just a moment, I'll discuss what PixelFed is not
and in short, it is not a photo management solution.
Another thing you can do with PixelFed
is you can add optional filters to your posts, if you wish.
Now this is something very popular on Instagram,
so having similar capabilities on PixelFed does make sense.
Now, what is it not?
PixelFed is not meant to be a collection management system for photos.
Now, I personally am not a serious photographer.
I do have a lot of photos going back over 40 years.
Mostly family pictures, holiday snaps, things like that,
kind of things that many people have.
They are my memories and mean a lot to me and my friends and family.
But none of them are ever going to show up on a site of great photos.
And no one is ever going to follow my photo feed
because I'm such an awesome photographer.
I'm more of the kind of person who just takes a lot of snaps
and throws out all the bad ones.
Now, I have all my photos stored on my network-attached storage device,
which happens to be a Drobo 5N.
They're also uploaded to both Google Photos
and I have a paid Flickr account.
And with that, I've got enough duplication
that I'm feeling fairly safe about my photos.
Right now, I have about 5,000 photos occupying
about 15 gigabytes of disk space.
I'm also trying to digitize a whole bunch of slides.
Not to mention, I would like to do more traveling and take more photos.
So all these numbers are going to go up.
PixelThet is not going to help me manage all of that, which is fine.
I have other tools like DigiCam for managing the collection
and Gimp for fixing the photos.
I'm a strong believer you should use the right tool for the job
and that can mean having a well-stocked tool chest.
So, assuming this has attracted you,
how do you get on PixelThet?
I've got a couple of options here.
First, you can set up your own server.
The PixelThet software is all open source.
So installing it yourself is perfectly fine.
What you need to have as a prerequisite is a web server
with the following prerequisites.
You have to have Apache with mod underscore rewrite enabled or in Gen X.
My guess is if you have a web server, you've got one or the other of these.
At least if you're listening Mac or public radio.
You have to have a database.
Well, that's not bad.
My SQL 5.6 or above
PostgreSQL 10 or above
or MariaDB 10.2.7 or above.
I think, again,
probably anyone contemplating this already has one of these databases.
PHP 7.2 or above
with a number of extensions,
BCMath, C type, curl,
XIF, icon V,
INTL, JSON,
MB string,
open SSL, tokenizer,
XML, and zip.
You also want to have redis
for in-memory caching and background task queuing
and image magic for image processing.
Now, if you're an experienced web administrator,
I think you would look at that and say,
standard.
There's really nothing surprising in that list of requirements.
Well, then, to install,
you would install the software using GitClone,
do a little configuration, and you're done.
All of this is covered on the Pixel Fed website.
And this will be a good time for me to mention that my show notes
have links to all of the things that I discuss.
So, I have linked to the page
where all of the instructions for installation are covered.
Now, if you're someone who does not manage a web server,
and I don't, frankly,
then you're option be to join an existing server.
And there's a number of those out there.
There is a site, again, link in the show notes,
that's very useful for federated media,
called appropriately enough the federation,
which brings together information
for a variety of federated media platforms.
So, go to that site,
click on projects on the left,
and then select Pixel Fed,
and you'll get a page that gives you some useful information.
Now, I am working at the beginning of August here.
And as I look there, I'm seeing that there are 138 nodes
for Pixel Fed, as I write this.
Now, nodes are servers, basically.
So, that means there are 138 places you can investigate
for an account.
Since being listed here is entirely voluntary,
there are probably more nodes than this,
but it's a start.
Also, on this date, I can see that there are 22,993 users,
183,468 posts, and 36 comments.
Getting back to the nodes,
some are open for signups, and some are not.
So, you should look for ones that are open.
There's plenty of them,
but as you scan the list,
you will see many nodes that have only one or two users,
and most of these seem to be closed.
I would say they represent people
who have set up their own server for their own use,
but don't want to open it to anyone else.
Because of the costs and resources involved,
I don't find this an unreasonable approach to take.
So, of the nodes that are open and accepting signups,
you probably want to do a little bit of investigation.
As I mentioned above,
albums are limited in size.
Is that going to be a deal breaker for you?
If they only allow four,
and you say,
well, I routinely like to post five or six photos at a time,
then you don't want to get on Pixfed.com.
Now, when you get to the homepage of the site,
go to the bottom and click on the privacy link
to read the privacy policy.
In the sites I have checked,
it seems pretty boilerplate.
They tell you what data they collect,
how long they keep it,
and what they do with it.
Now, you might be surprised that they collect any data at all,
but if you sign up for an account,
you have to give them a name and an email address.
And anyone running a server is going to have logs,
which is, after all,
only to help guard against abuse.
Also,
you might want to make sure the site is running an up-to-date version
of the software,
since that will have all
of the latest security patches.
At the time I'm writing this, again, beginning of August 2020,
most of the sites are running PixelFed 0.10.9,
which is the latest,
but I saw one node running 0.7.10.
Finally, the country the node is located in
may be a factor in your decision.
Now, once you've evaluated the choices,
you need to create an account.
I decided to register an account at pixelfed.social.
For a couple of reasons, number one,
it is the largest,
and number two,
the people who are already friends of mine
tend to have accounts there.
And so that makes it kind of easy.
Now, on this server,
the password has to be a minimum of 12 characters,
which is longer than I'm used to,
but I use the password manager anyway,
so I don't mind.
After filling out the registration,
I needed to respond to an email
to validate my address.
Once I did that, I was in.
My address, if anyone cares to follow my feed,
not that I tend to post a lot,
is at ahuka at pixelfed.social.
Now, that's a very similar address
to the one I have for my mastodon,
which is at ahuka at octodon.social.
No coincidence,
they're all using the same activity pub protocol.
Now, the next step is to get your network together.
There are three ways to do this.
First of all, start asking people
if they have a pixelfed account
and what their address is.
So I mentioned my buddy Murf helped me out,
and one of the first things I did was ask him,
do you have a pixelfed account,
and what is your address?
I asked him that on mastodon,
he responded right back,
and so I went and immediately started following him,
and then gave him my address,
and he started following me.
So, you know, that's how it begins.
Then there's the search field.
Now, most people will use the same username
on all federated platforms.
As you saw, I'm ahuka everywhere I can be,
unless someone gets there ahead of me.
So I could, you know,
Murf's address is Murf and so on.
So I took some of the people that I follow on mastodon
and said, well, let's see what happens
if I try searching using that name.
So I went through my mastodon feed,
picked up a bunch of names,
remember to use the at sign at the beginning.
That's part of the addressing in activity pub.
When you get a result,
click on the profile,
and then on the profile,
you can click to follow.
Now, this could be a pixel-fed account,
or you may be connecting to their mastodon instance,
because the whole idea of activity pub
is that it lets you connect different platforms.
For instance, I have seen pixel-fed posted pictures
in my mastodon account,
and mastodon posted pictures in my pixel-fed account
because I cross-followed other accounts.
Well, finally, you can just look for new people to follow.
There is a discovery link at the top of the page,
and if you click on that,
you see those three categories,
photography, art, and nature.
So you could just click into one of those categories,
and if you see some pictures you like,
you can check out that person decide to follow them.
Now, how do you use pixel-fed?
Pretty straightforward.
One thing you should know is that the smartphone app
is in progress, but it's not done yet.
They announced work on it in November of 2019,
but since the world has gone to hell since then,
who knows when it will arrive?
You know, under present circumstances,
I tend to cut a whole lot of slack for just about anyone.
So for now, you need to use it by logging into the website.
That's not a problem for me.
I don't tend to do a whole lot of stuff on my phone.
I'd rather do it with a computer with a large screen.
So to make a post, click on the user menu icon on the upper right.
Select new post and upload a picture.
You can add a short caption.
And you can crop the picture.
Since storage may be limited,
my account appears to give me five gigabytes of storage,
which seems like it's a decent amount,
but as I said, I've got 15 gigabytes of photos,
so I'm not going to be putting them all up here.
A little judicious cropping might help to cut down
on the amount of storage that you're using,
and allow you to have more photos.
Now, on the bottom, underneath the photo that you've uploaded,
when you're making your post, there are filters available,
and it scrolls across the bottom.
So use the arrow key to scroll.
You can also tag people if they are on the same server you're on.
Now, that last makes tagging a little less useful,
is part of the trade-off of using federated media.
Now, another useful feature, as we discussed above,
is that you can have all of your pixel-fed posts
your own and anyone you follow appear in your mastodon feed.
Just search for a user name in mastodon,
and you will see for some people two entries,
one of which would be a pixel-fed entry.
Just click the follow button,
and that person's posts will now be in your mastodon feed.
I just saw one this morning from my friend Craig Maloney.
It was something he posted in pixel-fed,
came right into my feed, no problem.
And searching for your own user name
will let you add your own pixel-fed account the same way.
Now, the vision behind activity pub
is that you should not need to have multiple applications
or multiple tabs open all the time,
just to follow your social media.
So I think that ultimately the ideal would be
to have mastodon be sort of the dashboard to everything.
We're not there yet.
I hope we'll get there.
Now, what about supporting?
I've said many times,
you should support free software.
And as my friend, door-to-door geek,
often says, support the people who support you.
I support the principal activity pub developer through Patreon.
I also support the person who provides my mastodon account
through Patreon.
Providing these services takes both time and money,
and while I cannot give someone time,
I can provide money.
So I just added the primary developer of pixel-fed
to my Patreon as well.
And it doesn't have to be a lot.
Most of the people I support on Patreon
I give a dollar a month,
which adds up to $12 a year.
That's a price I don't mind paying for good software and services.
And I would hope if you use any of these,
you would feel the same way.
The reason we can have awesome stuff like this
that is free and respects our privacy
is because of people who are putting in a lot of time and effort,
and we should support them.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio,
signing off and reminding you,
as always, support free software.
Bye-bye.
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