Pixelfed should be designed like a lightly gated garden

Pixelfed is a federated instance compatible with Mastodon and geared towards photographs. Their website and iOS app feels a lot like instagram in the old days, and that's not a bad thing at all.

It's also great timing, as Facebook continues to do questionable things that make you wonder why you're supporting a weird billionaire in the middle of a public meltdown. At Instagram, you share your photos freely for a service that will likely scan and train AI on your stuff and can take away your account at any time. Instagram also features mobile apps that are byzantine in their design, and rarely show you up-to-date photos from your friends, which is originally why you signed up.

With Pixelfed built on the same technology as Mastodon, it means no one weirdo owns it all and can take it down or use it for nefarious purposes. But it also means if you sign up for Pixelfed, you will have another new account tied to it, where you can post primarily photos.

So Pixelfed creates a bit of an identity crisis. Here's my new account over there.

Pixelfed vs. your "main" mastodon server

This was pointed out by Chris Enns when I reposted my first Pixelfed upload to my main mastodon account.

My thinking at the time was: ok, let's try out Pixelfed under my new photos-only account there, but I'll reblog the "good" photos over to my main mastodon account, so people who want to see a daily photo from me can follow this "other" account of mine. Eventually, I can stop reposting when it feels like my Pixelfed account has gained some steam.

From Chris' perspective, it was confusing for him. Wait, do I follow Matt's new account too? Does Chris follow it on his own Mastodon account just to see photos, or should Chris view them at Pixelfed in a better interface for viewing photos under his own Pixelfed account?

On my side of things, opening a new Pixelfed account meant I wasn't following anyone so my homepage feed was blank. I want to see big, beautiful photos from people I know, so I started looking for friends that also had Pixelfed accounts. I found a handful, but I also accidentally followed people I already followed on my main mastodon account.

Looking at my notifications at Pixelfed, it isn't easy to tell the difference between interactions from another Pixelfed user and a regular Mastodon user. This is a problem because there's not a good reason to follow other mastodon people from my new Pixelfed account if I'm only looking for photos at Pixelfed (Pixelfed only displays mastodon posts with photos attached, and skips the text-only normal ones).

What if Pixelfed looked a little bit more like a walled garden, but remained open at its core?

Here's how I think Pixelfed could be less confusing to people by acting just a little bit more like a typical social app, while remaining completely open.

1. I wish Pixelfed users were highlighted on Pixelfed's own site and apps. Put a special badge next to Pixelfed usernames so I know I'm interacting with people on the same system. Or put a pale yellow background on their mentions so they pop out to me.
2. Let me filter my mentions for just other Pixelfed users. The best way to build up a fun feed is to follow interesting people, but I want to follow lots of other people using Pixelfed from my Pixelfed account. I'm less interested in friends on other text-heavy servers who fave'd something of mine.
3. Build a tool that lets me upload my following list from my main mastodon server that finds those same folks that also have a Pixelfed account, so I can follow them on Pixelfed.
4. Keep everything the same under the hood. It's all still on a federated social service, so people on other servers can leave comments on my Pixelfed page and people can follow my Pixelfed account on their own servers using other Mastodon clients. Nothing changes with the underpinnings of the service.

I know this would be a slightly different approach compared to the always-open, always-federated regular Mastodon servers, but I think Pixelfed has an opportunity and a chance to distinguish themselves from other Mastodon servers and services because they're doing something truly unique.

It's primarily a photo display service (with some online memes too) and I think it'd benefit from being just slightly more inwardly focused. Highlight other Pixelfed users, make discovering new accounts there easier and smoother, let it become an island of photographers posting great photos that can also interact with a larger federated network, but it's ok when Pixelfed's own server and mobile apps look slightly different from other Mastodon servers.

The time for instagram alternatives is now

I really wish there was an easy to use competitor to Instagram, and I know I've enjoyed that on services like Glass, but Pixelfed could fill a similar role. I think it's perfectly ok for Pixelfed to give preference and visibility to other Pixelfed users. It's a unique service so I hope the people behind Pixelfed play that up. Make the Pixelfed service as unique as it can possibly be, do even more stuff geared towards custom feeds and photos that you can't see anywhere else.

Heck, I think the best possible outcome someday for the Pixelfed service would be when people start signing up to participate there who have never heard of mastodon or federation in the first place, because they don't really need to know about the technological underpinnings.

They can just share nice photos with their friends. In chronological order.