I realized that I haven’t spent time on Pixelfed in a while, and that it would be great to find more content to add to my feed! So I logged in to my instance (social.photo) and then… hit a wall.
With Lemmy and Mastadon, it is super easy to peek at what is going on at other instances and find communities to subscribe to, but it looks like Pixelfed does not make this easy. The biggest issue I have run into is that many of the largest servers do not seem to let you explore what is on them unless you first create an account, and the main Pixelfed Server Directory at https://pixelfed.org/servers does not indicate which servers can be explored or not, so you have to click a few times (since the link takes you to the registration page) to even find this out for a given server. It also does not help that navigating to an instance does not show you the content for that instance, like it does for Lemmy or Mastadon, but for a login page that may or may not have an “Explore” tab at the top.
Am I missing something here? I just logged into Tumblr for the first time in years and my immediate next thought was, “Gee, I should be using Pixelfed instead!” But if in practice it is simply not possible to find content I am interested in without a great deal of hassle then it is not a realistic replacement. In particular, it seems like the way Pixelfed is set up requires me to register on particular instances to get a better view of what content is available (not just locally, but pulled in from other instances). This seems contrary to me to one of the biggest advantages of the Fediverse, which is that you are able and encouraged to pick an instance that best suits you rather than the one where all of the content lives; in particular I could not imagine self-hosting a Pixelfed instance without being left out of most of the content available.
And just to be clear, I am willing to put up with some degree of hassle resulting from the inherently decentralized model of the Fediverse, since I switched completely over to Lemmy from Reddit about a year and a half ago after the API fiasco (and the only reason why I do not use Mastadon more is because I was never that into Twitter-style content to begin with). But having to go out of my way to get through artificially constructed walls to even find content to subscribe is a bit much.
However, again, maybe I am missing here. If someone is willing to point me to a resource that solves this problem problem and makes this entire rant sound completely ignorant then that would be great! 😀
Edit: Fixed silly typo.
Very very unfortunately, Pixelfed doesn’t have a way to just start exploring feeds without knowing exactly who to look at. This has been a very longstanding problem with the platform that the engineer has pretty much outright refused to do. Pixelfed-Glitch is attempting to add in better discovery options, but for now it’s a non-starter for me. I turned off my pixelfed server because of the lack of discovery.
I wonder what’s the reasoning against it? Seems like a no-brainer…
So lost in anti-big tech social media that they forgot that algorithms are actually good and helpful!
Kind of surprised this is the take. Algorithms in general, just sorting by highest to lowest or whatever common problem that needs to be solved, aren’t bad. “Algorithm” has become a dirty word mostly because of the stuff pushing short-form content over long-form content, outrage that generates engagement over something you would enjoy that doesn’t enrage you enough to make you type fifty paragraphs and keep coming back to fight in the comments, etc. So I agree with the literal statement that algorithms aren’t always bad.
But as for what you meant, I’m super surprised at all the people who want an algorithm to feed them content and aren’t satisfied. I looked for the stuff I was interested in, subscribed, and am happy. When I run out of content I either log off and do something else or go seek out stuff I’m kind of interested in. In my most charitable possible assumption, people who want algorithms are probably a lot less suspectible to getting pulled in by outrage and scrolling all day, and just want to be able to discover cool stuff fast, and the algorithms somehow worked to show them the cool stuff. In my experience I had to strictly stick to my Home feed with just stuff I subscribed to on Reddit to not see outrage porn, could never poke my head into Popular or anything without seeing some outrage sub like r/noahgettheboat or /iamatotalpieceofshit. And then they started forcibly sorting my Home feed by Controversial… yep. Stopped regularly browsing there really fast.
I am just really wary of asking for algorithms back because I really don’t want the Fediverse to become another place catered towards outrage porn for max engagement. I really want users to have options if this is implemented, so as not to force this algorithm on users like myself who like the “chronological order of stuff you purposely followed only” algorithm. And for that option to not be taken away from me in an effort to “drive growth!” and all that.
I don’t want to refuse others a good thing just because it’s not for me, but I also have been burned by social media algorithms that were once nice chronological, and later became catered towards outrage and showing you content you never signed up to see without having an option to switch back to chronological and opt out of having RandomInfluencerYouDontFollow in your feed. Looking at you, Instagram. I signed up with my elementary school classmates, liked chronological feed, liked having Explore just be friends of friends… I still only follow people I know in real life but now Explore is a bunch of controversial memes, people selling stuff, and influencers who want me to form a parasocial relationship with them. This is also what my regular feed, which used to just show me chronological order posts only from people I follow, turns to once I scroll past maybe 7 posts my friends made. Have not fully deleted but also haven’t touched the app in months now.
I guess the real solution is giving people options and not taking them away because you decided to go public and need maximum eye-on-advertisement time. Hopefully Lemmy stays open source and different instances stay popular, so in case someone does try to take it public we can all flee to different servers and keep talking.
That’s kind of a trend on the Fediverse to be honest. Mastodon has the same problem with their chronological-only feed.
I feel like transparent and open algorithms should be the way to go. For example, in the Lemmy documentation, I can find the exact math that is used to rank posts in
Scaledsorting.Perhaps an even better aporoach may lie in letting the users customize the factors determining ranking and how much they affect it.
What I loved about twitter was the algorithim at its peak before musk bought it
Algorithms are not universally good and helpful. They should be designed to boost engagement only in that they serve to find content you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, not to boost engagement at all costs by feeding you things they think you will click on. It’s an important distinction.
Maybe I’m missing something. I understand and agree with the concept of limiting or eliminating our reliance on algorithms for content recommendations. This seems like a different issue though, is it not?
Are there open bugs/feature requests about it?
Discoverability in the fediverse in general (outside of Lemmy) is a bit shite. Best just to stay here with us.
Yeah, I have to say that Lemmy has been a pretty great experience so far! 😀
ONE OF US!
ONE OF US!
ONE OF US!
I am a simple man, i just use the good old hashtags
But what if I want to be on a small instance or even self-host? Then I cannot see any potentially appealing hashtags because I do not start with a large library of locally downloaded content.
You can type the hashtag in the URL on the web, and follow it from there.
I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.
By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to https://astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold–look at all of them! So easy!
In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.
are you on .social? [ie, for me the url would be https://pixelfed.art/i/web/hashtag/urbansketching]
I use Pixelfed by subscribing to hashtags that I’m interested in and artists/photographers who I come across via hashtags or my instance feed.
I’m guessing that this is how Pixelfed is designed to be used as users and hashtags are what makes up your home feed.
I’ve never felt the need to browse by instance but I can see that this could be a cool feature to add if there are any which are dedicated to a particular subject or style. Of course the same functionality can be accomplished simply by users adding unique and specific hashtags to their posts e.g #celticsculptures or #seeninplymouth.
But if a hashtag has not made its way over to my instance, then it effectively does not exist to me. Even if I do see it show up and decide I want to see more content related to it, if said content has not ever made its way over to my instance then I am still left out. The great thing about being able about able to check out what is on other instances is that I am no longer restricted to whatever the people on my instance are interested in.
This a completely different experience from Lemmy, where I was immediately able to go to a bunch of different instances, look through their communities, and go: “I want to subscribe to this one, this one, and this one!”
Would you be able to subscribe to those things via your account if they hadn’t made it across to your instance though? I’m no expert but perhaps this is side-effect of controls for moderating federation i.e blocking or allowing content from other instances.
I do agree that it should be easier to browse any instance though. Some Pixelfed instances browser home pages seem to allow it and some don’t - I’m guessing it’s an admin option somewhere.
Off topic, but how do you do that on Lemmy? In jerboa there is no option (that I know off) to browse another instance. Do you open your home instance in one browser tab and the one you want to explore in another and once you find a community you like you switch to the other tab and subscribe to it there?
I just go to the web site, e.g. https://lemmy.sdf.org/.
Hashtags aren’t discoverable though, server A still needs to subscribe to at least one user from server B before hash tags will start
Feels like they’re still figuring out how they want to do this, themselves. Every now and then i’ve been visiting the art themed pixelfed to follow people with mbin, and the explore page is sometimes there and sometimes not.
The thing that I don’t get is that it seems like this should be a solved problem, because I can visit any Mastadon instance and see the content there just fine. Rather, Pixelfed seems to have gone out of its way to construct an artificial wall that prevents people from doing this.
