we have the ability to back up and transfer our instance before they shut down completely. we were paying k&t host $7/month to host our pixelfed since it was way more expensive to host ourselves. we could transfer to another host but it will likely cost more. the cost has come out of our 32-bit cafe ko-fi.
with this news and information in mind, i wanted to posit a poll to the community that will close on december 1st:
I agree with lost letters ā I think a more āgeneralizedā service like Mastodon, Misskey/Sharkey, or even Wafrn (though I understand if the last one is a little too new + has too āweirdā a layout for most people lol) would be of more intrest. Pixelfed was dedicated solely to images, and I know that turned me away from it.
I imagine you should be able to restore most of the pixelfed stuff to the new service too, if my understanding of activitypub is correct, so if this is possible then you donāt have much to loose.
Now Iām still not sure if I would join a fediverse instance, just because I donāt do social media much anymore period (outside of like, Tumblr). So feel free to take my advice with a grain of salt. But I feel like if youāre going to revive this service, itād be better to go this route.
(Also, not sure how the Pixelfed was run so ignore me if Iām suggesting something that was already done, but it may not be a bad idea to make a theoretical fedi instance be limited to only those already in the 32-bit community. So someone already in the forums or discord. Just so that moderation can be manageable, as I imagine it could otherwise become a lot to mod a chat, forum, and open fedi instance. Thatās your call though!)
I wasnāt a fan of the creator and stopped using Pixelfed so Iām ok to kill the service! A mastodon or other fedi instance is really hard to moderate. Maybe an IRC server instead? Iām also not sure how hard that is to moderate. (I help keep an eye on omg.lol and so far itās been pretty good.)
I donāt have a dog in this race; Iād just soon forget that the Fediverse exists, and Iād happily see ActivityPub go the way of XHTML 2.0, but I get that itās still valuable to others.
I gave up on Pixelfed as soon as the app wouldnāt upload my photos.
I am a member of a well-moderated, paid Mastodon instance and am happy there. I have no desire to moderate a Mastodo instance after seeing what goes on across the federated instances every other week.
That brings up a good question - for those of you already on Mastodon, would you migrate your account to the hypothetical 32-Bit Cafe instance? For me, Iām in a similar situation as @fLaMEd where I quite like the community of the instance Iām currently on, so I donāt really want to move, and I also donāt want to maintain two accounts.
I used the pixelfed instance a little at first, but I confess I mostly went back to simply posting images on my mastodon account. I never got into Instagram, so I guess I never figured out what made sense to post on pixelfed vs mastodon.
hey - havenāt been here for long but i second @starbreaker: i also much prefer discourse over fediverse, mostly 1) because of the way information is organised and conversations are held (like @fLaMEd said, thereās more depth and continuity on here) and 2) because fediverse is still a form of social media, and for me thereās a parallelism social media/commercial web vs genuine community/indie web (and i feel like discourse - and forums in general - are what is nearest to an online form of genuine community)
and also i heavily dislike discord but maybe thatās just me being a boomer and not a gamer at all haha
Iām happy with the Mastodon instances Iām currently in, so I donāt have the desire to migrate even if 32-Bit Cafe hosts its own Mastodon instance.
i might move my account should a 32bit mastodon instance spring up, mainly because itās currently on a fandom instance and i feel like iām more of a general poster nowadays, but tbh from the outside it seems like a lot of money and work. i also never used the pixelfed instance myself because i had no interest posting images.
Iām not a boomer and I play games a lot but I dislike discord as well. I can see how itās useful for things like coordinating multiplayer gaming sessions or general chit-chat, but its indiscriminate use is really annoying.
Sorry for the tangent, just wanted to reassure you.
About this topicās main question, Iāve got nothing to contribute. Iāve never used Pixelfed or Mastodon because fediverse social media is still social media :P
I personally donāt really have any issues with social media per se (I mostly detest the way the current juggernauts refuse to moderate), but microblogging in particular has never worked for me. I rarely find something worth posting, which means the occasional times I do post something I get no interaction. Maybe that would be different if I actually did things people were interest in, haha.
As a passive consumer, Iāve got a critical mass of interesting accounts to follow on Bluesky, not on Mastodon, but apps like Openvibe bridge the gap quite a bit. I do like the URL of the Mastodon instance Iām currently on (worldkey.io), though thereās not much of a community there, so I would be open to moving if a instance was created. Though I think building community-specific culture on there would be important, and Iād have no idea what that would mean in practice.
Thereās one activitypub project I am the most interested in, where the lack of a proper community I belong to makes it a no-go for me currently, and thatās BookWyrm. I like the notion of talking about books I and others have read, and I generally liked what I saw when I tried it years ago, but back then I was mostly just shouting into the void. I ended up moving my reviews to my website instead. Given how a niche project it is, I doubt that there are easy hosting solutionsā¦ let alone much interest in it.
I think Iād move over to a Mastodon instance if it were created. Would be happy to help with moderation too, if needed. Iāve been hearing so much about how difficult it is to moderate Masto instances but I modded on plenty of forums over the years and I never found it to be too demanding - quite fun, actually.
iāll ask this for a pulse check: