Follow Friday: Pixelfed vs. Instagram/TikTok

Continuing in the vein of where to post so other people can follow you with a feed reader: Pixelfed. It’s like Instagram, but decentralized – like email servers, you are on a particular domain but are connected to users on other domains in pretty much the same way you are to users on your domain. In my case I’m on pixelfed.social, the flagship instance, and I’ve started posting my picture entries there before I put them on Instagram, and also sharing my TikTok videos there.

One of the key things this does, that I haven’t really emphasized in past entries, is let you see everything in a feed, in chronological order. Instagram used to do this on the oft-neglected web interface, but as part of the recent updates that gave us the ability to post from the web, they also made it some weird algorithm-sorted method. UGH. This is bad for folks who post sequential things: comics, process pictures/videos, etc. Pixelfed doesn’t do that. You get a feed that is everything the poster posted, in the order they posted it, period.

As well as having a syndicated feed for readers, it is part of the fediverse like the Twitter-like Mastodon – so you can follow Pixelfed accounts from Mastodon and the posts will show up in a tweet-like format. The only drawback is that just like when you share an Instagram video post to Slack or wherever, video entries show up as stills. The TikToks, at least, keep all the branding so it’s pretty clear you gotta click through to see the video… QuiteRSS, at least, can’t even display them internally which is a bummer.

I’m pretty sure this means all my content is feed-readable, despite the fact that I am on a lot of silo’d sites as a business necessity.