pixelfed.ink ...part of an alternative to the grams

As I've mentioned recently, I'm slowly moving into nerdery world. So over the last little bit I focused my spare time on setting up a thingy for some of y'all that smooshes the creative & the tech stuff together.

There's a damn good chance that you've never heard of Pixelfed, but you may have heard of Mastodon. If you're a Twitter user or adjacent to one, then you've probably heard some buzz about the alternative not-twitter-clone open-source decentralized microblogging service that is Mastodon.

It's pretty standard social media stuff, but to be honest for many it does take some nerd-tolerance to dip one's toes in and get swimmin' in it. Much like the first time you programmed a VCR, so was it with Myspace, Facebook, and Instagram. Yet, there are some refreshing differences with these open source decentralized services that are owned by the humans on them and not by trust-fund dweebs getting rich off of tax-payer-funded government projects, using underpaid immigrant labor, fucking up SF Bay's cost-of-living, and building their media empires on the content the users are making for free. Especially the shitty content. 

I've got a pile of links below that explain it better and more concise than I can. But I'll quickly try to do it without involving the same ol' "email" analogy so many use:

To talk about this decentralized open source software (OSS) ethical alternative to corporate owned social media platforms maybe the best is with analogies using geographical terms...

If the big ol' internet webs is like all of the world, then "Fediverse" is like a large country within the world that is the internet.

The Fediverse is made up of several apps that use protocols which allows them to interact with each other. (for instance, Mastodon & Pixelfed use "Activity Pub")

It would be like if Instagram accounts could "like" & comment on posts and even follow accounts over on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Reddit & vice versa. This is basically the idea Dorsey's Bluesky is trying to  copy  create with his AT protocol. Except the Fediverse has been rolling for over a decade, runs on free & open source code, and isn't at the behest of corporate boardrooms, stock prices, or companies with large advertising budgets & PR problems (or still tied in with Elmo).

Going further down this decentralized rabbithole, each app is like a city within this Fediverse country. Mastodon would be sorta like a city there. Pixelfed would be another. 

And within the city that is Mastodon there are several "instances" (servers) that are like neighborhoods where people's accounts reside.

Each account has a local feed to see what others in their neighborhood (instance) are chatting about. They also have a global feed for what the rest of the city & country (Mastodon + other apps) are discussing. And there is a "home" feed which let's them know what everyone they specifically follow are talking about/sharing, including those they follow in other cities (apps).

Of course one can share links from the rest of the world (internet), but because of protocols like Activity Pub, one can actually interact with pretty much anyone within the whole Fediverse "nation" with relative ease.

Yet all of this is done without algorithms or advertising crammed into every 3 or 4 posts. No Ads. Just posts as they come.

Pretty dope shit.

What I'm trying to say with that long-ass preface is that I've spun up a Pixelfed instance.

Like Mastodon is to Twitter, Pixelfed is essentially an alternative (not a clone) to Instagram. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about the name I chose, but I wanted to retain the "pixelfed" name and the domain wasn't taken.

So it's pixelfed.ink.

Here's why I believe Pixelfed may be a decent place to be for some of us creative dorks and here's some of my hopes for pixelfed.ink:

Again, zero ads or corporate bullshit. But one of the sweetest things I miss from old forums (like Read Street) is Pixelfed's vibe is way chiller and not filled with a wack-load of selfies, family photos, or foodie pics. It's pretty much geared towards artistic photos.

As much as that sounds easier on the eyes and the soul, Pixelfed is currently inundated with pictures of cityscapes at dawn & birds on old fence posts. Because of the nature of federation and the different instances, I feel that we could make a place for those of us with more "low-brow" tastes and liven things up the timelines of Pixelfed as well as those of Mastodon and other Fediverse apps.

And Pixelfed's growth is mirroring Mastodon's & the Fediverse's recent explosive growth. Seems like the right time to plant a flag in Fediverse country and hopefully draw some more peeps over, too.

Another plus is that if anyone wants to just post cool stuff and use it like an easily shareable gallery, then it's there for them. Most people I know don't have IG accounts. Try sharing work posted there with any of them. It's pointless. For the most part they can't check your stuff out without having to create an account. Pixelfed is a way that an artist can post stuff and share with damn near anybody.

Which is another reason I stuck with the "pixelfed" name. I figure it'd be more straight-forward and could be on a business card or a link in an email and avoid an embarassing or confusing URL for users to share. (i am up for suggestions, but I am pretty sold on "pixelfed.ink". it's grown on me faster than some goofy name like "instagram" or "twitter" ever did)

The big hope is that some of you bohemian creative types (e.g., illustrators, tattooers, street-artists, sign-painters, punk/metal album/poster/merch designers) will use pixelfed.ink as an alternative to the meta-corp's instagram or at least find a second home there. I assume that many of us will keep our IG accounts for bill-paying reasons of promoting our work & whatnot, because "promotion" is pretty much what that place is all about. But for those of us that want to have a place to actually share our artistic stuff to not just Instagram users and for fun & some kudos, we will use it as a landing pad for showcasing our more creative artsy-fartsy-er endeavors. Pixelfed is that alternative. 

(another super neato thing is that most other Fediverse users can repost/boost/retweet (whatever you want to call it) your posts as well. Something IG absolutely cannot. Your IG posts & comments live & die mostly within your account's circle of follower on that app. Meanwhile, the Fediverse isn't limiting like that. I often "boost" my Pixelfed posts with a Mastodon account pretty regularly so that they can get reach well outside of even my mastodon followers there. As Mastodon & Pixelfed grows this'll just get more expansive.)

Hell, maybe some of us will eventually delete the IG like so many have already done in the Great #TwitterMigration of 2022. (just as most of us we did with myspace, 4chan, facebook, etc.) I spend about 98% less time on the broken bird app now and have been visiting & posting on IG so little over these last years that I pretty much feel uninspired & gross every time I open it up. (or maybe I'm just getting older and my tolerance for bullshit is waning)

A few issues...

• Open source. That's great! But while in many ways it's more trustworthy and safer than corporate platforms, it can sometimes be/feel klunky. So some tolerance for self-reliance & nerdery and the ability to "roll with punches" is required. With the influx of refugees from bigger platforms comes the nerds creating more & more awesome features alongside the fixes for glitches. But change can be slow or in random spurts. It's not going to be perfect. There's not a well-paid IT team working on making you understand why you may have to input another account's address in the search bar in order to click through to see their whole account in its natural form.

So it's not gonna be pristine. Yet, neither is/was any other centralized corporate platform at any point in their history.

Oh! And the main developer (who also runs the OG pixelfed.social) is an average but smart AF Canadian dude. That's some OSS!

• Servers/Instances. I rent & run the server that makes pixelfed.ink run. While I've dabbled here & there with front-end stuff for decades, I'm pretty new to this back-end server admin stuff. Luckily most of the coding is already done for us (thanks @dansup). I've made some cosmetic tweaks that will set pixelfed.ink apart from the other instances. Even making it so you know when you're on a pixelfed.ink page or not. But there's a looonnnggg list of features that are beyond my control at the moment.

As well, I set up the server and pay for it all by my lonesome. I've got an alright deal going, but can't fit a ton of people on it. Most instances limit the number of users so as not to wreck their servers. On top of cached data from other instances across the fediverse, uploaded pics & videos from users take up a ton of space. So for now, I'm going to limit the amount of users to 50. We may never come close to that or we could hit that ceiling within a week.

I may eventually take small donations for upkeep and/or expansion, yet this will never be a pay-for service and I don't want this to be like a second job. It should mostly just run itself with minimal hiccups. Too many users means too many headaches. On top of that, I'm hoping people will realize that they only need to upload photos sized 300KB or less.. A load of 2+MB files will fill up storage super fast and slow down profile page loading. (some more on that below)

I also ponder eventually moving to a self-host-at-home situation. But that wouldn't be for at least a year and I don't really see the trade-offs quite adding up.

That being said, pixelfed.ink is on a Hetzner server (a German green company running on 100% renewable energy) that's located in the eastern US (to keep it closer to home). They just opened up an even closer west-coast location, so we may be moving it in the future if an upgrade is needed.

• Registering/Onboarding. Instances on many of the other other federated apps (e.g., Mastodon, Pleroma) have either open Signups or they are closed with strict restrictions on joining. Unfortunately Pixelfed's current configuration only allows for open or closed Signups (but there is a solution the devs are currently working on).

So to keep the user-load and content not too out of sorts, I've tweaked a few things so that it requires anyone interested to email me at geoff@pixelfed.ink and tell me why they want to join & share reference/links to creative stuff they do. Then I will send them a link to be able to sign up.

I really don't want to gate-keep. But to keep the amount of users manageable and to keep it to semi-serious creative-types, I am resigned to be pixelfed.ink's "gatekeeper".

I'm not really all that strict or picky though. I just want to make a home for like-minded peeps. Users are welcome to post whatever (yes, boobies & butts are kosher in your tattoo/art pics). Even the dog and dinner pics are fine, but the goal is to have mostly creative stuff. The pixelfed-vibe is that your selfies should remain over on the Zuckerburp-owned platforms. If ya email me & get turned down, there is currently over 365 other pixelfed instances to join.

And because of the nature of the Fediverse, if users wanna mostly just follow accounts, they don't even have to join Pixelfed. The best move would be to make a Mastodon or any fed-elsewhere account and follow away. (my Pixelfed account follows and is almost exclusively followed by Mastodon accounts)

• Phone Apps. Most are works-in-progress and all are open source & free. So some nerd-tolerance is required.

Android has Fedilab, PixelDroid, or one can make it its own app on the homescreen.

iOS is less OSS-friendly, but there is a beta Pixelfed app that currently runs through Testflight. Or one can also make it its own app on the homescreen.

As for me, I prefer to do most of it with the browser on my laptop. It's easier to search and copy & paste others' URL posts and edit my own pics for posting. There is also editing within Pixelfed. It just isn't as feature-rich as IG. So it's up to you if you are an "app-person" or prefer the browser to get around and/or use easy-peasy online editing options.

speaking of... 

• Size. Currently each account on pixelfed.ink is limited to 1GB. I will eventually increase it, but images much over 200KB images on social media is pretty pointless and it'll take a while to get to a gigabyte's worth of storage. Videos/stories will take up more space, but we'll see how that goes.

One can post .jpeg, .png, .gif, and .webp image files and .mp4 video files, yet unlike most other platforms the image files stay in the same format. So if you have a cool .png with an empty background (e.g., the pixelfed.ink logos here or my canadian-iron-front post), it stays like that.

That's pretty awesome. Pixelfed.ink currently retains & displays an 80% image quality of each file. Meanwhile, for various reasons (mostly storage) bigger centralized platform reduce the quality much more than that and store/display files as shoddier .jpegs.

And exif data isn't saved on the pixelfed.ink server. Pretty cool shit.

• Free  ...but it costs me a little. If a buttload of users join up, then it starts getting costly really fast. So I may take donations. Many larger instances do this and often end up with more than enough funds to have larger, smoother, and faster running servers so that users get more out of it. For now, tips from tattoo clients covers all this pretty well. So I'll keep the user-ship manageable at no more than 50 users. Also if I get to working from home more, it'll be easier to keep an eye on a bigger populace and to maintain a bigger server setup. For now, this is just a heavy-duty hobby that I am inviting several of you to enjoy. 

Especially those that were able to keep up & read this friggin' far.

on a very very very serious note...

Long story, but I'm slowly moving into the tech-nerd world. I'm still available for tattooing. I'm still doing commissioned art & merch when able. I'll get more into it down the line, but all you need to know is that I am still around, but I am shifting some gears. A lot of of it has to do with what I've been doing on the side as an activist-y hobby & turning it into a career. The below relates to all this and I figured I'd preface this long-ass screed with that.  So...

Been trying to do a post like this for a while. At least since that white power dipshit shot up a grocery in Buffalo a little almost 5+ months ago. Shoulda said something then, but it seems that others, especially experts, are seeing the same shit now.
FFS, Ken Burns was like "well, no time like the present" and the Godwin's Law creator has repeatedly said, "yes, 'Nazi' is now a legit comparison.
Instagram’s a poor platform for this and I keep my other social medias pretty private, but here goes an incredibly truncated version of something that needs saying:

•THINGS AIN’T LOOKIN’ GOOD FOR ANY OF US•
  especially if this last week/month/year are any indication

I’ve been a history/politics nerd most of my life, but for at least the last 15 years I’ve been keeping eyes on darker corners of the web where far-right dickholes, like these mass shooters, roam and where white power dweebs openly discuss their hopes & plans for an ethnostate and the genocide it will take to get there in what they think are “safe spaces”.

What was once considered taboo in run-of-the-mill conservative circles has become normalized ideas & run-of-the-mill rhetoric.
Century’s old klan & fascist rhetoric are in the open again. Barely covert with spuriously worded sentiments like “I’m not saying they’re trying to replace whites, but blacks & immigrants are being used to change the voting makeup of America”.
Take it from someone who's spent too much time scraping, compiling and diggin through this shit...
it’s simply gettin’ extra fucked as the “We are the real America and everyone else is a threat to the society/youth/nation” rhetoric is becoming part & parcel of everyday discourse from talking heads & thought leaders. (see Echo’s Features of Ur-fascism #7.)

Little surprise. I could’ve/should’ve written a post 25 years ago about how adventurism in the Middle East would lead to a refugee crisis which the backlash would fuel a rising far-right movement. 15 years ago I could have mentioned how extremist ideas were being mainstreamed via website algorithms, social media bubbles, and a well-funded think-tank/media net and how most of a nation will be demonized & scapegoated as enemies/degenerates/others by a minority who think they’re the “real America” as the far-right gets into elected powerful positions in federal, state, and municipal offices.
 

Basically... hardened extremists push the messaging that democracy doesn’t work: “stop this steal”, “our elections are stolen”, “everything’s rigged”, “these institutions are against you”. They really, really want us to lose faith in democracy.
“There is no political solution” is a super common message found among violent & extreme actors on line and in IRL, because they want violence to be the solution.
When you have big politicians and big media figures laundering these types of narratives, especially from alternative or conspiratorial news sources, it’s not gonna be good. (also)

“Accelerationism” is the strand of thought that the current system is so corrupt that they should speed its demise through any form like violence and acts of terrorism, or celebrating natural disasters like power grids going down, because it contributes to making the state harder to govern.
They want to weaken a perceived status quo as much as possible so that it collapses and a new political order can be born that aligns with their worldview for how things should be (if overtly stated, generally something CI-esque, like a “Christian Nationalist white ethnostate”).
By increasing mainstream paranoia, people start to question whether they’re safe.

I could go on & on about historic similarities and correlations, but it seems the realization is hitting even moderate center-right pundits & politicians. So I can be slightly assuaged that the discussion has also hit a mainstream audience. Enough that an aging “let’s try making nice with the guys constantly calling me a commie” can’t ignore it and has to make the fashy-types uncomfortable for being called out for what we can all see plain as day. (I do wonder how much of this rising antisemitism & almost uniform regurgitation of Nazi-ish rhetoric has to do with almost every human that witnessed WWII no longer with us.) 

...after an awkwardly extra long hiatus from this thing, let's do some updating.

So I am still at Fraser Street Tattoo Shop. Well, mostly still here...

(we are out of stickers, but after this mess, we'll get back at 'em and some shirts will be available as well)

...because now here we are in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic chaos of 2020. Totally super crappy and for the first time in my life, I am out of work as one can be with little other options that would be essential in order to keep working.
I do thank the powers that be, that I live here in British Columbia where the provincial government is NDP and at least tries to put people first. And living where the federal government is doing things to try to at least try to keep us slightly afloat....
...it's far from perfect as many are falling through the cracks and will continue to do so. At least the care for my preexisting condition is still covered and I am only just starting to be financially fucked.
But I look to our friends, families, and neighbors to the south, which is where I grew up and am still a citizen of, to see what a difference it make in a tough time when we need responsible leadership... you get leaders that don't want to take responsibility... errrrrfff.

With that said... I have some shirts and stickers and all sorts of merch-y stuff being made available now and even more in the near future.
At the moment, there are only a handful of options, but we also got some other shops in the works on both sides of the border and will be putting those up as soon as possible.

Severe Artburn at RedBubble

Please visit and order if anything tickles your fancy... it'll help slow the decline into deeper financial debt for out of work people like me.

Here's a few images of stuff from the last years. It'll probably take some time to get all this stuff up here... this post will probably be further down the roll by then.
In the meantime, stay super safe out there so that we can all get back to actual work and enjoy the closest that many of us are going to get to anything resembling "retirement".

oh and speaking of getting the leaders we want or need, we get the leaders we deserve...

here's BATMAN!

some colorful photos...

most of these are from the last year. probably should get better at this for the few people following this blog or for those of you visiting via fraserstreettattoo.com or instagram or whatnot.

not the best photo, but the best I could find

+13 months later...

Some big and some small done in the last year...