Jupiter Rowland@<a href="https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Erik L. Midtsveen🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈</a> @<a href="https://skol.social/@rob" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Rob</a> One main issue here is that the owner of the whole project is also the owner of the lighthouse instance. And the lighthouse instance is the biggest instance by far because it's the only instance that many newbies even know until well after they've joined.<br><br>We've seen that often enough in the Fediverse. But on Pixelfed, it seems the most extreme.<br><br>mastodon.social is so big that it's home of 22% of all active users of the whole Fediverse. But it has never outnumbered all other instances combined for as long as Mastodon actually mattered because one of Mastodon's early target audiences were geeks capable of running their own servers. In fact, mastodon.social hasn't even always been the biggest. Thus, it wouldn't be worth the effort for Gargron and the devs to assume control over mastodon.social since they've got so much competition already.<br><br>I remember when Lemmy really took off. That was when Reddit was enshittified by asking tens of millions of dollars for its client API, killing off all unofficial frontends. Just like just about all Twitter refugees fled to mastodon.social, just about all Lemmy refugees fled to lemmy.ml.<br><br>However, lemmy.ml is owned, operated and controlled by the devs. The devs are completely unabashed tankies, one being a Stalinist, one being a Maoist. ".ml" doesn't stand for Mali, it stands for Marxism-Leninism or rather МДЯ☭ЇꙄМ-LЭИЇИЇꙄМ. In fact, they have another instance: lemmygrad.ml.<br><br>The result was that Lemmy, as a whole, gained the reputation of being a tankie network.<br><br>Fortunately, however, Reddit was (and still is) so full of geeks that not exactly few freshly-converted Lemmings fired up their own public instances as alternatives.<br><br>This appears to be very different on Pixelfed. Who's Pixelfed's target audience? For one, artists. Especially photographers. Besides, Instagram refugees. Generally, the vast majority of people who daily-drive Pixelfed aren't geeks. In fact, many of them may never have laid hands on an actual computer in their lives and only ever have used phones as their main digital end-user devices.<br><br>Thus, it's highly unlikely that disgruntled Pixelfed users rent Web space (or even set up a server at home) and launch their own Pixelfed instance. This leads to a lack of (known) alternatives to pixelfed.social. And I guess there are not exactly few Pixelfed users for whom pixelfed.social <em>is</em> Pixelfed. On top of all this, I don't know whether it's possible to move to another Pixelfed instance and take your stuff with you.<br><br>And so we have a situation in which confronting dansup for how he's running pixelfed.social is much more feasible than packing your things and moving elsewhere.<br><br>By the way, Loops' situation should give you to think. As far as I know, loops.video is still the only instance, and it's owned and controlled by dansup. Loops actually started out closed-source. And it seems not too easy to set up your own Loops instance, seeing as videos tend to take up tons of storage, and Loops lacks PeerTube's peer-to-peer load balancing, so you're bound to need a big, powerful, expensive server with a humongous RAID array for storage and an unlimited data plan.<br><br>Conspiracy theorists may actually be tempted to believe that all this was dansup's intention from the get-go: declare it "federated", but make it difficult to host, thus make it a "federated monolith" and control the entirety of it. Or why else did he whip up Loops when he already had Fedilab, the FediDB and Pixelfed to take care of, seeing as Loops was announced <em>before</em> there was an immediate need for a TikTok alternative, but <em>after</em> Bluesky's "decentralisation" claims had been revealed as humbug?<br><br>Speaking of the FediDB, look at what software it lists, and then look at what software the Fediverse Observer lists. The Fediverse Observer lists what it can. FediDB lists what dansup allows in, only that he doesn't dare keep server software out that's already fairly well-known.<br><br>#<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Long" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Long</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=LongPost" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">LongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLong" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CWLong</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLongPost" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CWLongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">FediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">FediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CWFediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CWFediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Fediverse" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Fediverse</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Pixelfed" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Pixelfed</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Mastodon" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Mastodon</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Lemmy" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Lemmy</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Loops" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Loops</a>