Pixelfed is bringing hundreds of thousands of users to the fediverse who don't know about federation.

I'm now overhauling our onboarding in the app so new users can login and join without the complexity of federation.

If you want to login to another server, you'll have to go into the options menu and select "Login to custom server".

Say what you will about centralization, the people are looking for a stable and ethical home for photo sharing, and I have 7 years of experience providing one.

@dansup so you are basically following Gargron with his simple onboarding idea that resulted in mastodon.social growing even bigger.

On the one hand you are asking for support with your immensely huge hosting costs, on the other hand you are driving this even more by drawing more and more users to your own servers instead of distributing them.

When I have planned to support you with your costs 5 minutes ago, I think I won‘t anymore because I think that this is the wrong decision. Additionally still no valid LDAP support after years and still no fix for the stuck account problem (resending confirmation mails).

@ij @dansup I understand your position well. There is a lot to criticise in Pixelfed and the decisions of Daniel. On the other hand, it feels for me, we don’t have many chances left. I prefer to support the suboptimal but open approach close to values of the Fediverse instead of letting this chance pass by and have democracy in fire in the next decade. I never understand how everyone can be so demanding to someone who gave so much in advance, be it imperfect or problematic. It’s still a big gift

@Sascha Hmmm, I don't think so that I'm too demanding. I've been in talk with @dansup about e.g. LDAP integration for like 2 years or more. I even provided a dedicated LDAP server to him so he could thoughoutly test the LDAP integration. I even offered some money as a bug bounty for a proper LDAP integration.

Regarding the stuck account registration with undelivered mails that needs to be resent, I'm not the only one that was asking for a fix - which Dan said that he was working on.

But instead of working on bug fixing, my impression is that he wants to implement new features and new apps. I understand that new stuff is more fun to work on compared to bug fixing, but bugs needs to be fixed as well.

WRT onboarding: some days ago he removed pixelfed.social from the server list. Now he aims towards the opposite.

And I fear that he is in danger of burning out: too much stuff to work on and too few contributors.

@ij I agree, I don’t think you’re being too demanding! And great point about the parallels to Eugen’s making mastodon.social the default.