Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense for Pixelfed to be a thing that has its own accounts, rather than being an ActivityPub client whose GUI just happens to be image-focused?
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:03:34 JST jwz - Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged) likes this.
- Matthew Lyon repeated this.
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Daniel Supernault (dansup@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:14:49 JST Daniel Supernault @jwz we have a lot of Pixelfed specific features like ephemeral stories, portfolios, collections, etc.
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infinite love ⴳ (trwnh@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:15:17 JST infinite love ⴳ @jwz ActivityPub C2S is missing a few bits. Rather than fill in the gaps, most fedi devs have decided to rewrite the same delivery-server logic over and over and over and over and over and o
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Jef Poskanzer :batman: (jef@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:18:17 JST Jef Poskanzer :batman: @jwz We know you can use the Mastodon UI to look at a Pixelfed server, but what happens if you use the Pixelfed UI to look at a Mastodon server?
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infinite love ⴳ (trwnh@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:20:11 JST infinite love ⴳ @dansup @jwz those could still be handled with Pixelfed being an AP Client -- say pixelfed.example asks to oauth into activitypub.example, and whatever you would POST to an inbox you would instead POST to your outbox
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semnosao (semnosao@ursal.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:20:22 JST semnosao -
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:27:17 JST jwz I see this thread is going to be One Of Those.
Oosp.
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:29:04 JST jwz Apropos of nothing, I remember some guy who spent most of the 90s having people tell him that it was insane to combine a mail reader and a usenet reader into the same app, because they are completely different software platforms that serve completely different intents and have different feature sets.
Oh wait, that was me. The guy was me.
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Brad (bk1e@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:50:00 JST Brad @semnosao @jef @jwz “Just the pictures” also includes any screenshots, memes, etc. that you post, not just your photos, drawings, paintings, etc. IMO, there ought to be a way for a single user identity to publish multiple feeds for others to follow, rather than using multiple identities.
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semnosao (semnosao@ursal.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:50:00 JST semnosao @bk1e @jef @jwz this is the beauty of open source, the one who proposes can always be the one making
go and create your vision, we will be rooting for you
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animoné (animone@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:50:30 JST animoné @jwz I seem to recall Pine being quite a capable mail and news reader. You know, when usenet still contained actual news..
* I still use (al)pine as my main email program to this day.
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PuercoPop (puercopop@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 07:54:19 JST PuercoPop @jwz there is work to do in both sides. The client can focus on the UX for uploading and viewing image objects. But also they can and have extended the object types to better suit their use case. Ej. The Story object type. I also imagine that a set of images could be its own object type, but afaict Story is the one only pixelfed specific one
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AK (ak@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 08:38:44 JST AK @jwz or at least, something you can Oauth into with an existing account
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Rodger (rodgerd@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 09:16:24 JST Rodger @jwz shit usability seems to be a point of pride
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Daniel Supernault (dansup@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 09:20:31 JST Daniel Supernault @trwnh @jwz yeah that's true, that would be interesting to see!
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Chancerubbage (chancerubbage@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 10:01:26 JST Chancerubbage @jwz my favorite RSS feed reader was built with a UI a lot like a Mail app, but I never saw any one trying to combine them.
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yes, that allartburns guy (allartburns@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jan-2025 11:37:38 JST yes, that allartburns guy @jwz If my memory is correct, I was reading mail and USENET in emacs around that time and probably disagreed.
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 12:23:28 JST Evan Prodromou @jwz It would be better if it worked the way you described.
I think the reason we got where we are is that the Fediverse fell into a pattern of making Open Source replacements for proprietary social network services. So, Mastodon is the Twitter replacement, Pixelfed is the Instagram replacement, Peertube is the YouTube replacement, Lemmy is the Reddit replacement.
I think the way out is for more of them to give you the option of acting either as their own server, or as an ActivityPub client.
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Daniel Supernault (dansup@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 14:08:46 JST Daniel Supernault @Chalkllate @jwz Yeah the new webUI is going to be a nuxt app that will be compatible with other platforms.
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Chalk (chalkllate@yeen.town)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 14:09:26 JST Chalk @dansup@mastodon.social @jwz@mastodon.social not saying you SHOULD have gone that route, there is something to say about ease of development and decluttering, but if you were to separate the pixelfed client from serverside stuff in the future it'd work well for a lot of other projects as well
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Chalk (chalkllate@yeen.town)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 14:09:31 JST Chalk @dansup@mastodon.social @jwz@mastodon.social to be fair misskey also has a gallery and collections system, and friendica iirc had automatic post deletion options which could be ported to misskey and commited upstream, pixelfed as a misskey client would work fine minus the stories part. I'm assuming you'd want more features in the future, though
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 16:35:03 JST jwz To summarize the replies to my question, so that you don't have to continue incorrecting each other in this thread:
Author of ActivityPub spec: "Yeah that's not how any of this is supposed to work."
Author or Pixelfed: "There are some reasons, they're not great, we hope to fix that someday."
A bunch of people: <some kind of conspiracy bullshit>
Literally everyone else: "The way it was implemented is Right and Perfect, better things are Not Possible, you must not Understand Software."
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Frenshape (frenshape@beige.party)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 17:16:41 JST Frenshape @jwz it doesn't make any sense to me, but after creating an account and posting a random image nobody showed up to tell me how I was doing it wrong because I didn't include a sonnet of alt text and hide my picture behind some magic assortment of shame tags.
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 18:23:25 JST jwz @mapto You need not continue incorrecting me.
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mapto (mapto@masto.bg)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 18:23:26 JST mapto @jwz well, there's always going to remain a gap between intentions and execution. The nice thing about pluralism is that nobody stops you from doing it differently if you truly believe in your ideas.
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jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 18:54:42 JST jwz @oblomov @frenshape "♬️ I boosted my post today, to see if I still feel.... ♬️"
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Oblomov (oblomov@sociale.network)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 18:54:55 JST Oblomov @frenshape @jwz are you even doing social media right if nobody pops in your feed telling you you're doing it wrong?
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Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged) (taylan@fedi.feministwiki.org)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 20:33:59 JST Taylan (Now 18% More Deranged) @jwz I wish I could see responses to your post. Fedi barely federates sometimes. -
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Greg Whitehead (grwster@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 22:13:24 JST Greg Whitehead @jwz Hah, thanks, I had the same question