- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
Pixelfed has been making incredible strides over the past few years, and has begun developing a suite of different platforms and services for the #Fediverse. After just one day on Kickstarter, they’ve already smashed their campaign goal.
But they still need your help!
How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?
How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?
How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?
The fediverse has way, way, way more in common with the Internet of 2005 than it does with the Internet of 2025. You have to act more like it’s 20 years ago.
Pixelfed not a centralized service. It’s a web engine. It’s something that lets you host your own photo sharing website. If you want to syndicate stuff from someone else’s website, you need to find it on their website first. Fediverse websites just let you do the syndicating by automated request.
To initiate the syndication request, you take the post/user’s original URL, paste it into your website’s search bar, and then hit enter. It will request and fetch that content, creating a local copy for you. From there, you can follow the person who originally posted it, creating an auto-syndication relationship.
If you’re trying to promote federation, this isn’t the way to go about it.
Ok, but if I don’t have an account on their instance, how do I even find their URL?
I think they’re making it more complicated than it needs to be. On any other social media site, you find people by their username. So just ask for your friends username (username@instance.com) and put it in the search bar and it’ll come up. Using the URL can be convenient on desktop because you can just copy and paste it from the address bar when you’re looking at someone’s profile.
And if you want to discover new people where you don’t already know their username, then I believe that is the same as any other social media as well, you can come across them in the comments of people you follow or go to the discover tab or search hashtags and you’ll find new people that you can tap on and follow.
I feel like this basically covers how you would find people. A lot of people get hung up on how you know what instance other people are on but it doesn’t usually matter. Either someone will give you their username which includes @instance.com, or if you don’t know the instance you can search for their name and all known accounts with that name will show up.
For example if I just search my username “BakedCatboy” (not my real username), the search results show both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts.
That makes sense. It is a bit ironic. Like everyone wants to go back to old Instagram where you just keep up with friends, but I think we’ve all grown accustomed to our feeds and our friends don’t have enough cute cats and dogs to accommodate our interests.