My fear with pixelfed and loops is the single dev seemingly more interested in money and clout than in building something long lasting for the community. I don’t expect it to last long, but my friends really crave an app to exchange reels in and so we’re hoping loops will be sufficient until something more stable comes around.
Yeah, this one guy has been trying to jumpstart so many projects. And that’s admirable, but it’s also too much for one dude (and I know he’s tried to get some other people, but there has been drama around that - by him, I think).
But more to your point - something feels a little off even though I can’t confirm anything. It does feel like this guy might just take some money and run if given the chance.
And I don’t necessarily blame him for that - I probably would too. I don’t want to work, and if I had money I wouldn’t.
But there’s just this feeling I can’t shake about all of it. And I have a Pixelfed and a Loops account. They are both fine, so we’ll see, I guess. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I end back up with Mastodon being my sole social place for sharing photos, for example.
New to open source? Good ideas don’t really die in open source. If loops.video or Pixelfed are good ideas, open source will just do its thing because no one owns the idea once it goes open source
Good ideas absolutely do die all the time even in open source. If the original dev doesn’t want to play nice, it’s actually pretty difficult to create a new fork that everyone will agree on. Hopefully these federated apps have enough inertia to prevent the userbase from splintering when the original devs move on.
What’s a good idea in open source that did die (and is still absolutely dead, even)? I’m sure you can find a GitHub project and be like “I like this idea and it’s dead” fine. But these projects are so used and popular… they aren’t going anywhere. That’s the context of this discussion. These apps are fine if the dev leaves because they are open source now. The right people will continue the work of this guy goes I think.
Isn’t the point of this thread that the code isn’t actually open source - that the released code isn’t anything substantial?
I see the backend and front end released. The back end is AGPL and the front end does need a license (assumed it had one, my bad). Assuming he puts the same AGPL license on the front end, I don’t see anything unsubstantial? The community gets to make squooshloops or whatever name comes up and the backend and front end belongs to them at that point to release on their hardware.
It’s all ActivityPub, so mastodon users wouldn’t miss see a thing go wrong? Start subscribing to squooshloops.social accounts from your instance’s deprecated Pixelfed software like nothing happened because the squoosh devs were smart to make it compatible with other ActivityPub apps. Once adoption hits a masse, and maybe ActivityPub specs changed, and squoosh added new things to their spec that other services expect or depend on, new versions of squoosh and other activitypub software stop trying to be backwards with the unmaintained pixelated and loops.video software. Those instances are forced to use a fork or stop federating with those other instances who no longer support the old stuff. The world keeps moving and remember that time when squoosh was originally that failed loops thing.
Kinda like how Chrome has its roots in WebKit which has its roots in KHTML which has its roots in KDE. I’m not seeing a problem honestly. Yes, KDE’s konqueror is dead (rip, I used KDE and loved that jelly K browser icon ever since I was like 12 in 2005). It lives on in chromium though, and has spread all over the world because of electron. Very weird story for that browser, but it somewhat shows my point: open source doesn’t die. It isn’t perfect — lots of valid complaints about chromium and electron, but none of the valid complaints are “that idea is gonna die if Google dies”
Well that’s great news if you’re right. It doesn’t change that the creator seems to be immature and therefore not the most reliable social media Steward, but if the SW keeps getting developed or a better system comes from the open source nature as you suggest then I’ll be happy.
That’s funny because it’s not difficult at all to build an app like this. The value in buying such a business would be the scale of its user base, which is likely only several thousand at this point. And, if it were sold, most people would leave since most of those users are just dipping a toe in at this point to see what the app is like. Frankly, the content sucks. People are using this app out of goodwill and an interest in helping to build an alternative to the corpo apps. If dansup sells or does not open source, then that goodwill evaporates.
Building an app like this for 100 people, sure. Making something handle smooth, affordable video delivery at scale. That’s a spicy meatball.
The front-end is a mess for testing but doable. Then if you do live, you’ve got proxies and stream copies.
I host stuff at great scale, it’s a different beast.
The value of loops right now is the attention it is getting. Buyers are trying to swoop in early and bet that they can capitalize on the growth to get more money from other investors.
VC are gambling money as always
You cant do more than dip a toe in, as there is no more functionality and even that is buggy and incomplete.
Yeah this guy toying with selling is pretty insulting to anyone trying to help him out.
Dan is constantly talking about buyout requests he’s receiving for Loops and Pixelfed, so much so that it makes me a bit suspicious of those claims. Nearly every other post I see from his Mastodon feed is bragging about another alleged buyout offer, and how he’s not for sale.
Has he ever shown proof of any of these offers he’s received? It’s not that I want to doubt him, but he’s been very persistent with this claim and I think it’s fair to scrutinize it at this point.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Pixelfed got mainstream notice, and there’s always someone willing to give you money. Pretty much every popular Firefox/Chrome addon developer gets emails about buying it, but those are usually just shady companies looking to push malware onto the existing install base.
Even apart from those, it wouldn’t really surprise me to see some VC interest when Pixelfed hit #1 on the play store. They love the idea of glomming onto something that looks like a rocket and trying to ride it to the moon
it might be useless gossip but for some reason a lot of fedi has various problems with this guy. for various reasons… he just has like … off vibes?
i guess similar to how lemmy devs are marxist lenninists—at least making it open source means projects can be forked if the founders go off the deep end.
not just “off vibes”, he posts a bunch of shit that people call him out on, and then deletes it
He stirs a lot of shit on his Mastodon account and gets into spats with other fedi devs. Just the other day he got into a one-sided spat with the GtS dev because the GtS dev implemented a feature to randomise the number of active users, which led to goblin.technology topping pixelfed.social in the FediDB charts. He then accused them of doing this to undermine him specifically, of wanting to ‘de-legitimize Pixelfeds growth’, despite it being explicitly a privacy feature.
My favourite part about this is that Pixelfed has been misreporting stats for years.
lmaoooo thats so petty what
Nah. If you’ve ever run a mildly popular website, you’d know that you get spammed with ads for seo, content marketing, and buyout requests.
Yes, but nobody believes those buyout requests. They’re clearly phishing attempts.
Where’s the code? There’s only 9 commits to the backend and its only scaffold code. There’s not even activitypub?
Same with the app. Was this just a publicity stunt?
Not even a surprise open sourcing…
Nvidia did it better :)
Yeah “open source”… The app doesn’t even have the source code…
Looks like skeleton code to me? I don’t see how that could be what the site/app are running on
I thought it already was open source
It wasn’t. He had previously said that he would open source it after it had become more stable, but there was a lot of skepticism that he would follow through.
what an asshole
the backend not the app
deleted by creator
Is there no iPhone app?
Appears to be in TestFlight
Pardon my ignorance, I am new to the fediverse and have no idea what I’m doing. But, when I signed up for loops on the website, I had to wait 3 days for them to send me a link to download a test-flight app for loops. I cannot recall if TestFlight is standard on iPhone or if I downloaded it previously.
Test flight is opt in if I remember correctly and allows you to download beta versions of apps. So I would assume you signed up or activated it or whatever for an app.
did he at least get a dollar value first?
edit: I honestly would have pursued it as far as legally possible first just to know how much of a fuck you I was sending … can someone offer to buy Bluesky now?
I could give you like $20?
Thank you for your generous offer, AdamEatsAss
You should haggle a bit mate. I think a few things are on the table here.
Fine, tree fiddy AND an ass eating. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Would it be more or less if Adam wasn’t eating your ass?
Less
Now he can tell the next guy that $20k isnt enough, because he was already offered it by AdamEatsAss last year
Can’t wait to see AdamEatsAss’s changes to bluesky, he will take the company down the right path
AdamEatsAss is a man of the people. He’s got his finger on the pulse of popular opinion.
He is the defender of democracy in free speech. Without him we’d be astray
Yeah this is just vaporware at this point.
Sweet… this is the first time I’ve ever actually used vaporware. Typically I never get a chance, but it’s impressive that Dan was able to release vaporware.
Vaporware can also include prototype spaghetti code releases.
Nice, and now we’re just changing definitions of words to match what we think they should mean. That’s so woke.
Is DEI also vaporware?
This app is currently available and works. Not sure what your problem is.
Did you try to actually add content? I did. 5 videos on the android app, as the webui has no option to upload or even edit already uploaded video. My experience is that loops is a garbeled mess without any taught or plan, that recurringly crashes or enter endless loading screens.
The web ui has no option to even view the feed, as far as I can tell. Only individual videos and the settings.
I use it several times a day and have uploaded several videos since early January. I’m using the android app exclusively and there have been a couple of times that I went to use it and it wasn’t working, but mostly it works great.
Wtf. That pixelfed asshole was writing this shit as closed source before?
He was working on it but it wasn’t completed until now. I’m unsure why it wasn’t open sourced from the start but either way, it’s open sourced now.
Not sure you can trust him at this point.
Worse case scenario he gathers telemetry and sells your information or gives it to a company that does. Either way, it’s gpl so we can clone it and host it ourselves.
Nah. He could sabotage documentation efforts. Loads of orgs use Foss licenses and aren’t trustworthy
