The “carbon copy of Instagram” link in my post goes to Pixelfed. While I think it’s an amazing display of fediverse tech, I hate Instagram to much to like it. The square cropping of images on the profile pages frustrates me beyond belief. If a photographer does not shoot 1x1 (or crop to 1x1) all I’m looking at is strange automated crops of their images. So, I have to click each picture in their stream to see it as it should be seen. A masonry style layout (like Flickr uses) would be the good move here.
Maximum resolution for portrait oriented images is 1350 pixels high (same as Instagram), which is quite limited. Mastodon could be an alternative, but it took the worst cropping practice from Twitter and it even crops portrait oriented images to landscape in the feed, a practice that even Twitter gave up after years of complaining from users.
Pixelfed does not seem to work without a full fledged db. The stack is not trivial.
I know it’s an old thread this one, but I have recently read this article on Vero, with a straight comparison to instagram, saying how instagram is no longer a true place to be for photographers etc while Vero is (obviously). I found it mildly interesting and after a quick search here I realized that Vero was actually mentioned here a long time ago!
I wonder if any of you has used Vero and found it interesting/useful etc
Addendum: I think most of you will know it but “vero” in italian means “true”. Oh right I get it! In fact the tagline is “the true social”. And then: “Ad-free, Algorithm-free Social”… these things sound nice.
[after five minutes]
Hang on: I have looked a bit on the website and well maybe it’s open to all etc etc but if you’re over 40 and you’re not a “creator” or an “artist” (or a crazy dude that shoots from the top of skyscrapers) then this is all verboten for you. I already know what they’re saying from over there: yo old man, go back to your Ansel Adams books!!! (I prefer Harry Gruyaert but that’s what they’re saying).
I’ve never been much into social media - I have a Flickr account but that’s it - but have wondered about Vero. Looks quite good, although there seems to be a few question marks over the ‘long term’ strategies that they might or might not use for funding etc. I can’t stand Instagram or fb so not sure.
Interested to hear what other people think.
I also wanted to test vero but then read about the CEO and didn’t want to support this guy.
For the Moment Mastodon and a Website will be fine for me. Mastodon is intervened with pixelfed so it doesn’z really matter where you go. Depends only which look and tools you prefer and which onstance.
Photog.social is a mastodon instance, which means its more Twitter-like than instagram-like. Photog.social makes some tweaks to the way mastodon displays images to make it better for photography.
Pixelfed seems hellbent on mimicing a ton of insta’s features like stories and expiring messages and all that. That might be good or bad depending on what you think of those features.
Masotodon is more of a simple twitter. Your posts go into a timeline, there are tags, there is text, there is images. Those features may be good or bad depending on what you think of those features.
The two platforms federate via activity pub, so they’re mostly interoperable, so you can follow people from pixelfed on mastodon and viceversa.
Thanks! Yeah, I have a Mastodon account, I actually follow you and a few other people who are also active here on pixls. I also have a pixelfed account but I’m not really active there. I think I’ll switch to photog.social in the future.
While I think it’s an amazing display of fediverse tech, I hate Instagram to much to like it. The square cropping of images on the profile pages frustrates me beyond belief. If a photographer does not shoot 1x1 (or crop to 1x1) all I’m looking at is strange automated crops of their images. So, I have to click each picture in their stream to see it as it should be seen. A masonry style layout (like Flickr uses) would be the good move here.
and a few other people who are also active here on pixls. I also have a pixelfed account but I’m not really active there. I think I’ll switch to photog.social in the future.
