Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"?

Yes, if the mail provider is advertising the fact that they are dropping everything containing "P" AND if I'm currently not in the mood to read anything containing "P" AND if there are enough good alternative mail providers that do show me things containing "P".

What a weird take.

PixelFed never claimed to be selling pizzas (images) and salads (text). Just pizzas right?

And if it didn't tell you and you had to find out via an article?

Expecting an photo centric app to display text only post is really ridculous. What's thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app. With the same logic , why not complaining about mastodon only allowing micro blogging short text?

Seems like the article was written first maybe?

It's totally a problem: If I take a look at my Mastodon account from Pixelfed, there are a lot of screenshots shown and some other random images. Which totally does make sense as I do post stuff like that on Mastodon and screenshots totally make sense there. But if you take them to the center of the stage into a photocentric app, that really does look like shit

No, you as a poster in the Fediverse are selling pizzas and salads. PixelFed is "misrepresenting" you, for lack of a better word, by telling people you only sell pizzas. The thing is, it wasn't doing that before. It was purposefully made to hide useful information that was there before. IMO there should be a sticky "this user has other content which is not images" headbar or something. Only removable as an opt-in per account followed, so that it is not possible for people to say that PF purposefully hid information.

No it doesn't. Just like someone don't expect to see images on tiktok or long form text on x. Nobody would expect to see text only posts on Pixelfed

If that guy was right there wouldn't be defederation and many defederation are not announced

But pixelfed is only selling pizza and the cudtomer complains that he didn't find a salad option

Well, Mastodon will show everything in the feed, no matter if it's a video, a short blog, a long blog, a picture, a podcast, whatever. Mastodon is (primarily) microblogging in terms of output, but an everything platform with a chronological feed in terms of input.

This is where this user seems to get confused - they expect everything on the fediverse to display every type of content, just like Mastodon strives to do. Which is, as you said, ridiculous. If PixelFed was to display audio content and Funkwhale was to display pictures, what would be the point of these services in the first place? If they want everything to be Mastodon, why don't they just stick to Mastodon? Maybe Pixelfed users have no interest in reading their dumb blog posts?

Then you probably should have double checked before signing up to an e-mail server dedicated to "Explore + Share beautiful e-mails without the letter P in them". Pixelfed is extremely open about being a picture platform.

The consideration you should pay to other software should depend on your power and influence in the network.

If PixelFed was dominant in the fediverse, and other apps did feel the need for a dummy pic workaround, that would clearly be a problem. No client feels the need to do that because PixelFed is not dominant, but if it was, it would be fine to criticise them for not "playing nice" and helping the rest of the ecosystem.

I think there's much more scope to criticise Mastodon for the workarounds other software have to use to be interoperable, than PixelFed, purely because of its power in the network.

We need different apps to experiment and work out what users want. It's totally fine to experiment with different models and ways to view content. Only when you have a lot of influence over the ecosystem should you have extra responsibility.

I guess the consequence of this is that you won't have many followers on Pixelfed.

Occasionally photographers on Mastodon I follow from Pixelfed will post things I don't care much about, but at least I get to see their pictures without having to see their text posts in which I have little to no interest.

That sounds great. It's like people on the internet don't know how to start a conversation anymore. Can't just say "man I'm struggling with my ADHD lately," they gotta post every decade-old meme from their personality meme folder so people can reply with "haha same"

A new social media site doesn't mean new content, it's just a new bucket to fill up with the same shit from every other platform.

(I feel obligated to point out that PugJesus is generally an exception for my meme hatred because he includes descriptions/context for the history memes he posts and I actually get something out of it. Shout out to PJ)

Then this would be pretty shitty.

However, pixelfed is very straightforward about the fact that the focus is on image posts and even if they would not advertise that fact you should realize in less than five minutes of using it that all the posts you see are image posts.

Additionally there are enough apps out there that show all content (I use the default mastodon app to see image posts as well as text posts, etc.). If this is what you want just choose that app.

And if somebody makes an app that only shows text posts then this would be great for people who only want to see text posts. I really don't get the authors problem.

Yes but being able to do that is a design goal of the fediverse

What’s thr point of making pixelfed just another mastodon type app.

The problem is the Fediverse could be a lot more than just "decentralized versions of existing apps". Most people now have this app-centric mentality because it was beneficial for Big Tech sharecropping, not because it was better for us.

We shouldn't need different types of apps to see different types of feeds and to sort our data in ways that we want.

We are going to build this as an opt-in feature

I think that the the problem is that it's opt-in, when it should be the default.

All that's needed is the reminder (as visible as possible) that content you are looking at is incomplete and you can find the more complete version on this or that URL or app.

That's what Mbin does, it displays a banner on federated user profiles explaining that they may be incomplete, with a link to the same profile on the originating instance.