Pixelfed Smashes Kickstarter Campaign Goal on Day One
Things are just getting started...
Pixelfed, the beloved little Instagram alternative that could, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign. Setting a modest goal for CA$50,000, the effort has already shot past CA$63,000 on its first day.
The core focus of the campaign is to provide additional resources to facilitate faster development of its core apps and platforms: Pixelfed, Loops, Sup, and PubKit. Some remarkable stretch goals include facilitating full-time development, hiring additional people to work on the project, and creating a non-profit Pixelfed Foundation.
The overwhelming support we’ve received in just the first 13 hours of our Kickstarter campaign demonstrates the growing demand for ethical, surveillance-free social media platforms.
Daniel Supernault, Creator of Pixelfed
This early success isn’t just about Pixelfed – it’s a clear message that people are ready for a more open and interoperable social web through the Fediverse.
We’re humbled by the community’s trust in our vision and excited to accelerate the development of tools that will make decentralized social networking accessible to everyone.
Why Do a Kickstarter Campaign Now?
Despite a lot of development going on with Pixelfed and its various projects, a lot of this effort boils down to one dedicated guy doing all this work in his spare time, plus a small team of volunteers. While Dansup pulls a small amount every month in user donations, as well as NGI Grants, he finally feels that it’s time to grow the organization and kick development in gear.
“Pixelfed has been recently climbing the App store rankings,” Dan explains in his campaign page, “after Meta started blocking any links to Pixelfed, we started getting additional buzz on Tiktok and other platforms, which has only motivated us more.”
During the growth surge, Pixelfed’s flagship instance saw a surge of over 200,000 new user accounts. The project creator noted that his project won’t be sustainable for very long without additional funding and support, especially when it comes to maintaining service for all the new people moving into his corner of the Fediverse. Due to this rapid growth, the platform overtook Lemmy on FediDB’s software rankings, becoming the fourth biggest project on the network.
If there ever were a time for a “next stage”, a crowdfunding campaign just might be it.
Recent Work
For the past two years in a row, we’ve tried to put together updates talking about all the things Daniel Supernault has worked on under the Pixelfed umbrella. In both cases, we’ve failed to keep up. As a sort-of compromise / apology, we wanted to take a minute to look at some of the different things he’s worked on. Lists are not exhaustive, despite our best efforts.
2024
Official Pixelfed Mobile App
Pixelfed’s official mobile app has been pretty solid for a while now, but the app needed a refactor because its UI framework of choice had been abandoned by the developer. Pixelfed Mobile now runs on (whateverthatnamewas), which gives developers much more flexibility and power when designing interfaces.
The app is jam-packed full of features, which kind of explains why Dan might want to break the experience into several different apps, rather than trying to do everything in one place. Let’s look at what’s been teased so far.
New Camera / New Compose Feature
The mobile app’s camera feature has been rewritten several times, to incorporate a better user experience and greater stability. The camera app and resulting editing / upload flow have to do a lot of heavy lifting now, so streamlining them together make a lot of sense.
There’s also been a little bit of a tease for livestreaming functionality, which Pixelfed originally supported through the much-older Pixelfed Live app. How it fits into Pixelfed is unclear, but it might end up getting incorporated into Pixelfed Mobile, Sup, and Loops.
Loops, By Pixelfed
Dansup released Loops late last year! It’s still a really young project, but it aims to create a Vine / Tiktok competitor for the Fediverse. There’s some really cool ideas behind it, and I’m hoping to see the project get adoption and open up more in the near future.
PubKit
Dan also released a free developer tool for people building ActivityPub apps! He says that he uses it a fair bit when doing his own development, and figured it would be handy to turn into a full-fledged project.
Pixelfed Groups
The often-hyped Pixelfed Groups has been getting a lot of love recently, and Dansup has taken his time to get the details right. It’s a notoriously difficult feature to develop, especially when it comes to matters of balancing compatibility, user privacy, and moderation controls.
It seems that we’re finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Groups has been teased in varying stages of development for several years now, and there have been questions as to when this might actually ship to end users. According to Dansup, there is a high chance we might actually see them this year.
There’s a lengthy laundry list of requirements, but Pixelfed Groups is being actively tested for compatibility with Lemmy, Kbin, Friendica, Hubzilla, and Smithereen. In addition to supporting FEP-1b12, Pixelfed also intends to incorporate private and local-only group functionality.
Pixelfed’s group implementation is also interesting in that it will bring in an additional timeline and notification system to the platform with support for multiple activity types: text posts, quote posts, link cards, events, polls, rich formatting, and real-time chats have all been stated as being supported by the developer. What’s even more wild is that the entire experience will be opt-in for users.
For admins, groups will also offer a comprehensive system for fine-grained permission controls, a detailed user moderation log, and a “Slow Join” mode to set rate limits on newer members.
Finally, Dansup hopes to offer open specifications for all of the work that he has done implementing groups. Hopefully, the work done here might get turned into Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, which will help other developers in the space with implementation.
Collections
Pixelfed has had a Collections feature for a while, which basically lets you compile posts into an album. With a recent post about DeviantArt’s decline going viral, it seems that Pixelfed may be slowly shifting into a position to support artists and photographers with portfolios.
The biggest evidence of this change so far can be found in a redesign of the feature for Pixelfed’s official mobile app. The current process for creating a collection is manual, and requires users to flag individual pictures from their profile for inclusion.
The redesign in the screenshot above suggests that collections can be created on the fly, and might even let users upload to their collections directly. This could be a much smoother way for photographers are artists to organize and curate their works.
Improved Discovery
User discovery is one of those things that’s rarely talked about, but it’s extremely important for seasoned and brand new users alike. For Pixelfed, a lot of development work has gone into improving platform infrastructure, so that it’s easier for servers to help people find interesting things they want to follow.
Pixelfed’s discovery mechanism relies on a microservice called Beagle, which is a content ingestion service run by the project. What does it do? It ingests public content from Mastodon and Pixelfed servers to see what’s trending. The ultimate goal appears to be a mechanism for brand new servers and user accounts to automatically pull in content from the rest of the network.
We don’t know all the details about Beagle yet, but a recent update by Dansup indicates that this might be shifting towards a relay-based architecture, which might be a less-centralized approach than how it worked originally.
Parental Controls
Parental Controls is a new feature funded by the NGI Assure program, a spin-off of NLNet geared towards a variety of solutions for problems the next-generation Internet will face. Users can now provision accounts for family members, and set permissions for Allowed Actions, Enabled Features, and Preferences for privacy settings.
One really cool feature is that child users can be promoted to full-fledged Pixelfed accounts once they’re deemed old enough. When that happens, the parent account no longer has any access to the settings or permissions in the upgraded account
Admin Features
One big focus for Pixelfed over the past few months has been the emphasis of an improved safety experience for both end users and instance admins alike. The project recognizes the various ways that a federated network can be abused, and has doubled down on solutions to tackle them.
Instance Diagnostics
Redesigned Dashboard
For admins, one of the really big changes involves a focus on putting all the configuration settings they need within Pixelfed’s admin dashboard itself. Previously, admins had to edit config files in a server directory, but this is no longer the case.
Admins are now capable of editing every setting, from supported mime types to S3 configuration to user settings and auto-followed accounts. This is probably the most robust admin instance dashboard I’ve ever seen.implements Mastodon’s Move activity
Autospam
Signed Requests by Default
As a special consideration for PubKit, Dansup has made the statement that Pixelfed will be configured to automatically use Signed HTTP Signature Requests by default.
Curated Onboarding
Curated Onboarding lets admins set up specific steps in the User Registration process, with flexible options for how accounts are approved. Not only does this help to smooth out the user registration process, but it also spells out what an instance’s community is about, and sets expectations for what’s required from users who want to join.
During account review, admins can reach out requesting additional details that aren’t part of the existing registration flow. This can be handy for verifying linked accounts, requesting additional details about the person who wants to join, and even provide a reference to another user who invited them.
On the Admin side, Curated Onboarding also brings in a number of mass actions. This is really handy for dealing with spam bots and trolls, and helps keep an instance free of those kinds of nuisances.
Account Migration
This one flew under the radar for a lot of people, but Pixelfed officially supports account migration. Not only that, the platform makes it possible to migrate to either a Pixelfed or Mastodon account.
Granted, this kind of account migration won’t allow users to take their posts or interactions with them. Still, the platform correctly sets up a redirect and migrates your followers, and goes the extra mile to support any platform that implements Mastodon’s Move activity.
