Pixelfed, an alternative to Instagram, has matured over the years. One of its biggest, most powerful features is about to touch down - federated groups. And it will be compatible with Lemmy and Kbin.
Pixelfed, an alternative to Instagram, has matured over the years. One of its biggest, most powerful features is about to touch down - federated groups. And it will be compatible with Lemmy and Kbin.
I don’t use Pixelfed and this blog post doesn’t do a great job describing it, so can someone tell me what the significance of this new feature is?
From my understanding, we’ll be able to see Pixelfed groups on Lemmy just like any other community and follow them. There could be a group/community, where people publish photos of cats, their art, urban photography, etc.
Will all images be federated from Pixelfed to Lemmy and vice versa? Between Lemmy and Mastodon Pleroma etc., only one image is currently federated in the initial post, and not at all in the replies.
All depends on how well they implement it, but I believe nothing is stoping them from doing it right
Pixelfed is basically a federated alternative to Instagram that’s been picking up a massive amount of momentum. The Groups feature is more or less federated Facebook Groups, with a bunch of robust tools built in, and will be compatible with Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines.
The reason this is significant is that it may prove to be the final push that makes groups a standard part of the Fediverse experience. Some of the biggest platforms in the space have lacked it, for years and years. This implementation could prove to be a really good blueprint of what the standard experience ought to provide, at a bare minimum.
Basically, Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines are federated as groups to the micro and macroblogging fediverse. People in friendica, mastodon or Firefish can interact with Lemmy and kbin by mentioning a community/magazine in their posts and following them the way they do with other types of federated groups (like guppe, chirp, friendica forums, etc)
Pixelfed didn’t have federates group support, meaning that its federation with the threadiverse was bad, not to say practically non-existent. Supporting federated groups and even having its own type of group will allow people on pixelfed to interact with Lemmy and Kbin the way other fediverse software do: following them and tagging the community/magazine handle in posts.
short summary: It means better federation between Pixelfed, and Lemmy and Kbin.