ryan

I tend to eschew social media. I've seen enough folks get into trouble with it that I consider it to be a moderately risky drug that I just don't need.

That, plus I'm just generally not very social by nature. I also can't bring myself to buy into anything that Facebook owns but that's a story for another day. Twitter was fun years ago, but it kind of became a stupid place for flame wars and now it's total chaos.

That being said, I can see some of the benefits. It's harder for me to find interesting people, harder for me to share my work or art, and it's increasingly hard to connect with people. Especially considering that most people can hardly conceive of someone without any social media presence.

What I have been interested in, is something like Instagram. Not all the fancy stories and other nonsense, but as a place to learn and connect with photographers and artists. For the past year or so, I've really gotten into using a mirror-less camera and I want to both share my work and learn from others.

To that end, Pixelfed seemed like a decent alternative. Sadly, it's missing the one feature it needs to fill that role. Apparently, it cannot federate across instances! So it's not really a federated instagram or photo sharing service... it's a service that you can follow from the fediverse (mastodon).

That's great and all. It's a start. But I want to self-host my content and follow/share across the fediverse. It just isn't there yet.

I'll keep an eye out for that feature and be willing to try it again once that's there. But for now, it seems it just isn't ready.