Pixelfed is a federated photo sharing platform similar to instagram, signing in with Mastodon lets you carry over who you're following on Mastodon.
So I wouldn't say it's too important, but I thought it belonged here.
I think it's also worth mentioning here that, since both pixelfed and mastodon belong to the fediverse, you can follow pixelfed users from mastodon and vice versa and see each others posts. :)
That's why the whole carrying over the people you follow stuff is a thing.
Yeah. Even though I’ll probably never use Pixelfed (I don’t use Instagram, either, or anything like it) I still acknowledge that’s a pretty cool feature.
And this is where federation and interoperability becomes nice imo, because one doesn't have to use pixelfed and can still get content from Pixelfed in their Mastodon feed, if they want to.
Say someone would like to see the content of just a few Pixelfed users, but doesn't want to create an own Pixelfed account just for that, one can just to follow those specific Pixelfed users with their Mastodon account to see the Pixelfed posts in their Mastodon home timeline.
good to know because honestly after Meta forcing a clone of my Insta account onto Threads (which I'll never use), really considering finally cutting ties with all mainstream social media and deleting my Insta in favor of Pixelfed. and just going total fediverse.
Streaming is more difficult since you have to create a viewership from basically nothing, while sites like Twitch, Kick, and Youtube have a massive userbase for streaming content. You can join a peertube instance but there seems to be little content and few users. Owncast is ok, basically more like hosting your own Twitch channel, but again you would need to byo userbase. You can use mastodon/kbin/lemmy to build up a following. Not sure if anyone has made a stable income from these services though.
And I'd think much more likely to be subject to copyright claims and/or child porn crap. it's bittorrent type sharing so it opens up to a world of legal pain it would seem. Really hard for a volunteer setup to deal with that.
Your Mastodon login is tied to the Mastodon server that you belong to. Mastodon servers are run by volunteers and servers can disappear.
What happens to your Pixelfed account if your Mastodon server shuts down?
What happens to your Pixelfed account if you switch to a different Mastodon server?
What happens to your ability to log into your Pixelfed account should your Mastodon server be down for maintenance?
What happens to your Pixelfed account should you be suspended by the Admin on your Mastodon server?
A Federated Fediverse login would need to be tied to a central entity that is permanent and always available. No such entity exists and will probably ever exist. I'd be cautious using a Mastodon login on any other platform unless someone can convince me I could recover my account should my login-affiliated Mastodon server become unavailable.
some people like a image focused experience. That's why Instagram and Twitter both exist despite having basically the same feature set.
Even more importantly, open standards need multiple implementations to thrive. Kbin and lemmy offer nearly the same feature set too, but having more than one implementation makes the fediverse more healthy
You can view Pixelfed from Mastodon, but the interface of Mastodon is more focused on text microblogging than on image sharing. By federating the logins they are kind-of making an SSO of sorts, so now you can use the full pixelfed interface but your suscriptions and history stay on your Mastodon instance and just federate over to the pixelfed instance you are login into.
That's how people new to the fediverse were expeting it to work (myself included when I joined last year), so it's nice to see it starting to shift that way.
Don't believe that's how it works. It's not SSO (which would be AWESOME). That will create an actual local account on other servers. This is still your mastodon account 'viewing' a pixelfed account via the ActivityPub protocol. It's just the 'view' that's different for different services (very broad definition). Viewing a pixelfed account/profile via a pixelfed instance shows you a photo gallery that has text with each photo (not alt text). Viewing that same pixelfed account from a mastodon account, you'd see a series of toots/posts text that happen to mostly have pictures. The reverse view of pixelfed looking at a Mastodon account, not sure but I'd guess just a mostly empty photo gallery with text associated?
Yeah, it's not SSO, that's why I wrote "of sorts", but the post is precisely of how Pixelfed will now allow Mastodon users to log into a Pixelfed instance with their Mastodon account, meaning they will not see the current view of pixelfed as looked from a Mastodon interface but should look as if the user had a pixelfed account, since they are using the pixelfed interface.
It's not released yet, so I have not tested it, but hopefully soon.
Seems like maybe I’ve accidentally done it right by having a separate log in to both my Mastodon insurance and my Pixelfed instance. I always wonder if Federation means I should have one log in across all the Fediverse, but seems like maybe not.
The original idea was that users would only need one acct to interact with all parts of the fediverse, but the mastodon team decided they didn't want that. They've said they want mastodon to be solely focused on microblogging and don't want to optimize for other fediverse media/platforms
Probably bad. It centralizes the logins on mastodon and give them power over all the other tools that depend on them. If a gafam purchases a big mastodon instance then he also purchases a lot of accounts too.
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