32-Bit Cafe Joins the Fediverse!

Announcements
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hello everyone! i hope you’re having an awesome time coding your entries for the back to school code jam!

we’re so stoked to announce that the 32-bit cafe is joining the fediverse with our own pixelfed instance! signups are now open!

if you’re familiar with pixelfed, you might already know the answers to the questions below. but i wanted to make sure we cover any common questions folks might have!

what is pixelfed?
pixelfed is an open-source, federated way of sharing photos like instagram through posts and 24-hour expiring stories. we decided this would be a fun way for our community to share photos and aspects of our lives with our fellow community members that uphold the same code of conduct and ideals around how we operate online. you can share and interact with the greater fediverse at large or you can keep your posts confined to our community alone. it’s completely up to you, and you control your privacy.

what makes this different than instagram?
one thing i personally love about the 32-bit cafe is just how freaking cool, encouraging, supportive, and nice we are. we see our pixelfed instance as a way to grow as a community, get to know others better, and express ourselves online without being detrimental to our community ideals. there’s no worries about advertising or data-scraping. “influencer culture” doesn’t (and won’t) exist on the platform, and we will be upholding our code of conduct in interacting with other community members. our instance will be safe for work, like the rest of our spaces.

personally, i’m excited at the idea of sharing aspects of my life that i have no desire to share on big tech platforms that are associated with my full name or data. i plan to incorporate my pixelfed into my personal website, which is something everyone can do! for folks who want to express themselves differently than they can in other corporate-owned spaces, this can be a good option.

is the pixelfed adults only?
pixelfed has a blanket policy of 16+ on the platform, and this might be a good middle-ground as pixelfed is far less discussion-focused and more image-sharing. however, this is something we are willing to try; if we find that 16+ does not work for our community’s culture, we will raise the age to 18.

what features does pixelfed have?

  • portfolios: you can build a public-facing portfolio, for photographers, artists, or anyone who wants to showcase their work
  • collections: albums of categorized photos that you choose
  • albums: up to 10 photos per post
  • stories: share what you’re doing at the moment or a photo status that disappears after 24 hours
  • reblogs: reposts of others’ that can be disabled in your feed
  • hashtags: explore content and follow tags
  • instagram importing: transfer over your instagram photos
  • mobile apps on both android and iOS
  • global federated and local feeds in chronological order

can i use pixelfed as a private image gallery?
yes! you are not obligated to open your privacy settings to the community. if you would rather post so that only you can see it, please do so.

what kind of photos can i post?
it might seem a little daunting at first, but this is an opportunity to show off aspects of your life or things you want to share with the community in general. did you buy something new you’re really excited about? or maybe you finished a crafty project, went to a cool location, or just took a really nice sunset photo. this is really yours, and you share whatever you feel like with us as long as it doesn’t violate the rules.

how is this hosted?
our instance is hosted with K&T host, an independent, fediverse-focused company and utilizing 100% green energy. we decided to not host this on our own VPS as to reduce resources, cost, and help other independent organizations offer services by supporting them.

is this using our SSO to login?
at the moment, no. this is something we’re open to exploring later on!

what mobile apps are available?

i am so excited as we expand our community offerings and web services at the 32-bit cafe, and i’m so glad you’re here!

if there is a pixelfed instance you think we should federate with, please let us know! other like-minded communities would be fantastic.

if you have any other questions, feel free to ask below. we’ll be announcing this in the discord, on the website, and i will be posting this on mastodon as well later on.

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OMG I’m SO STOKED!!! I’m tripping over myself to register :D Thank you for providing such an awesome service!

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I’m so pumped for this :smiley:

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oohh ive never heard of pixelfed, this looks so cool! joining asap

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oh, exciting! i’ve signed up, although i’m not sure how much i’ll post…

noob questions, sorry: can you follow people on other “parts” of the fediverse from this? like, if someone has a mastodon.art account, can i follow that with my 32 bit pixelfed account? or is pixelfed separate from that because it’s not on mastodon? the pixelfed home page says you can interact with mastodon but i don’t understand how, since i just see pixelfed stuff on pixelfed… is that part of what “federating” would do?

also the search bar at the top doesn’t seem to do anything, i don’t know if that’s because it’s a small thing that just started and it thinks there’s nothing to search or because i’m doing it wrong somehow or what hahaha. help? :cry: (i’m using firefox and it also didn’t work in a private window with all my extensions disabled)

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I’m very excited, I’m thinking about making an account on there to share some of my art & maybe even some doodles. :thinking:

Though I feel the need to ask. How long ago did you guys plan this? Was this something you were planning for a while, or was it a spur of the moment idea? Asking since I’m wondering about the longevity of this little project.

Sorry for asking these questions I trust you guys, I still have Yesterweb flashbacks. :sweat_smile:

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my understanding is this: you can follow folks on your pixelfed account, but you won’t be able to see posts unless there are images. (for example, you can see my mastodon account on our pixelfed after searching for it, but there’s no posts populated.) on pixelfed.social, i know you can log in with your mastodon account, and it looks like we’ve got some folks using other instances on our pixelfed instance, so there might be some playing around here that we need to do to better understand the relationship. :) lots of testing ahead, i think!

the search bar at the top looks like it’s for searching for specific users in our instance. (try searching @xandra.) searching hashtags right now will be empty as we populate the server with posts. you’ll be able to dive more into instance discovery on the discovery page.

i hope these answered your questions! :bitty_smile:

hey, it’s okay. :) i understand that folks might be wary due to other projects that have fizzled, but the 32-bit cafe isn’t going anywhere as long as i am able. we expect waxing and waning of community members–perhaps a change of guard at some point as folks get busier or older or just can’t do it anymore–but part of the reason to decentralize is to increase our longevity. instead of having one point of “failure” for the community, there’s multiple opportunities to transition to others and increase our lifespan. it’s one of the reasons why we transitioned to a self-hosted discourse (which has been around longer than discord has). we should be trying new things, spinning up new projects, making things interesting for us as community organizers and for our community at large.

i would say, though, instead of comparing us to the yesterweb, i’d like to compare us to the indieweb organization, which has been around since 2010. i hope i’m not speaking out of turn for the other baristas, but we actually enjoy getting folks to build websites and participate in this side of the web, nothing more and nothing less! the baristas, including me, are dedicated to this community and to help others build websites. that is actually a pretty good baseline ask, and volunteering in this way is not just a way to get others to do something; it’s a joy in and of itself.

all that being said, i don’t think the amount of time it took to plan is actually relevant to whether or not we keep it up. the discord was a spur of the moment thing. we started the website on a whim. mass changes to the community (such as a discourse migration) are clearly much differently handled, but for services like this, technomancers and folks in the community are just looking around and asking, “what is the need? what can we add? where can we bring something valuable to a community of people just wanting to have a nice, encouraging space?”

this is also a good reminder to folks that volunteer-run ongoing projects on the internet are not going to be around forever. that is one of the reasons why i personally think it’s imperative to not have digital walled gardens of information and services, and why it’s especially important to move our social data into the federation space, which is less dependent upon instances staying alive. if community members do not want the community to die, it won’t. if folks stop participating, or interacting, or engaging with the space at all, the community will eventually die. the onus is on all of us to keep this going. :)

finally, after all of my yapping–if it’s any consolation at all, pixelfed has a privacy pledge that we have signed in which you have to give 6 months notice before closing an instance. and, because it’s federated, you can take all of your photos to a new instance, and you will have plenty of time to migrate if that’s what you’d like to do. :)

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This. Show me your websites

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I apologize, the yesterweb was my only frame of reference to a community like this. Hence why I used it as a comparison. :yb_sad:

That’s a fair point.

I was just worried that due to the possibility of it being a “spur of the moment” decision, that it would blow up in everyone’s faces. I should’ve at least acknowledged that even well planned out projects can go awry.

Oh? I didn’t know about this, now I feel a bit silly worrying about this lol. My bad. :sweat_smile:

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While I can understand the concern, I think that having a quick turnaround time between deciding to setup a project and getting it up and running is important sometimes because you can maintain momentum. It is important, especially for volunteer projects, to be able to share what we’re doing and get feedback as soon as possible, because we have the time now to work on it and can’t guarantee we will have time later if we were to intentionally slow things down.

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it’s okay! i don’t want you to feel bad for raising your concerns. i was only trying to soothe and help explain a bit more.

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I’ll follow people I see in the local timeline from my self-hosted instance (sns.feistel.party).

Maybe we could get a “relay” going for those of us who are self-hosting.

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What’s involved with a relay?

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I think the main purpose of a relay is to populate the global feed and make hashtag following and search work better.

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thank you for hosting this! i’m having fun seeing what everyone’s shared so far. :pixelcat2:

does anyone know if there’s an existing widget for displaying your most recent pixelfed post on your own site? i did a little searching and wasn’t able to find anything.

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I haven’t seen one myself yet, but I’ll certainly share if I do!

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Is anyone having trouble uploading from the official Pixelfed app on iOS? i know it’s in beta but wondering if it’s just me :smiling_face_with_tear:

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i was having trouble too! i ended up creating a home screen bookmark of the mobile site :melting_face:

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Ok, yeah I’ll just do that :sweat_smile:

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