The decentralized Instagram alternative is a great option if you want to back up your feed, focus on photo-sharing, or cut loose from Meta's empire entirely. And making the leap is surprisingly easy.
I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server just as much as I’d trust Meta with my personal photos: I won’t.
I’m pretty sure Pixelfed wasn’t intended to be a place to share your personal photos - it’s meant for sharing photos you want to share with the public - could be a circle of friends or the whole world. Photos like pictures of your cats, food, landscapes etc. It’s a place to share photos with friends, or a place to connect photographers with other photographers.
Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.
I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.
It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.
Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.
The big issue is security. Setting up a VPS is quite technical but not impossible. Making sure it is secure is a totally other matter. Then keeping up with all of the updates, patches, and vulnerabilities is a full time job. So hosting stuff outside your own LAN is not something to take lightly.
It’s nice to see someone questioning these things and not ignoring the fact that you’d still have to use the platform even for self hosting. There’s been a lot of mastodon instances of people acting in bad faith, there was even someone who had the FBI take their hard drive with everyone’s posts on it. This isn’t inherently safer at all it’s just not run by those large corporations. What about hosting something where people in other countries have different laws? No one seems to talk about that much either. Also the guy who made mastodon wants to partner with Meta anyway and people are arguing in favor of that. What was the point? On lemmy, are the posts truly deleted if you can recover them or if there is a backlog of comments and changes sitting somewhere? This isn’t for people who care about privacy and it’s not discussed enough and oftentimes when it is it seems the person or people get piled on and it goes nowhere.
Also glad there are discussions about this. Somehow Lemmy and the Fediverse seem more privacy friendly but it’s just as public as anything on the web - which makes sense, since communities, posts and comments are public anyway. So I’m not sure how it could be more private with the currently design.
There are however protocols that can provide the foundation for more privacy friendly and decentralized applications like Web5 and Solid.
The article is about transitioning from Instagram to Pixelfed, i.e. it’s targeting people who already use Instagram. If an individual is an Instagram user already, then privacy clearly isn’t a consideration for them, and if it was, there are countless articles already regarding Meta’s approach to their data that don’t need to be recycled here.
If your concern is your data, then yes, don’t trust anyone but yourself. As has been said, there’s alternatives for that, including self-hosting.
Pixelfed’s advantages aren’t limited to potential privacy features though, which I agree would have been excellent items to raise in the article, such as a focus on photos and a complete lack of any algorithm forcing tailored content at you. But this is a how-to article, not a feature comparison. I’m sure we’ll see a prevalence of those in the future but it’s still early doors. I would argue that it literally does imply that Pixelfed is more privacy focused though - it’s right there in the title.
deleted by creator
I’m pretty sure Pixelfed wasn’t intended to be a place to share your personal photos - it’s meant for sharing photos you want to share with the public - could be a circle of friends or the whole world. Photos like pictures of your cats, food, landscapes etc. It’s a place to share photos with friends, or a place to connect photographers with other photographers.
ok? then host your own. that’s the fucking beauty of decentralized social media.
Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.
I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.
It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.
Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.
The big issue is security. Setting up a VPS is quite technical but not impossible. Making sure it is secure is a totally other matter. Then keeping up with all of the updates, patches, and vulnerabilities is a full time job. So hosting stuff outside your own LAN is not something to take lightly.
Wired is for people who want to talk about technology without actually taking about technology.
It’s nice to see someone questioning these things and not ignoring the fact that you’d still have to use the platform even for self hosting. There’s been a lot of mastodon instances of people acting in bad faith, there was even someone who had the FBI take their hard drive with everyone’s posts on it. This isn’t inherently safer at all it’s just not run by those large corporations. What about hosting something where people in other countries have different laws? No one seems to talk about that much either. Also the guy who made mastodon wants to partner with Meta anyway and people are arguing in favor of that. What was the point? On lemmy, are the posts truly deleted if you can recover them or if there is a backlog of comments and changes sitting somewhere? This isn’t for people who care about privacy and it’s not discussed enough and oftentimes when it is it seems the person or people get piled on and it goes nowhere.
Also glad there are discussions about this. Somehow Lemmy and the Fediverse seem more privacy friendly but it’s just as public as anything on the web - which makes sense, since communities, posts and comments are public anyway. So I’m not sure how it could be more private with the currently design.
There are however protocols that can provide the foundation for more privacy friendly and decentralized applications like Web5 and Solid.
The article is about transitioning from Instagram to Pixelfed, i.e. it’s targeting people who already use Instagram. If an individual is an Instagram user already, then privacy clearly isn’t a consideration for them, and if it was, there are countless articles already regarding Meta’s approach to their data that don’t need to be recycled here.
If your concern is your data, then yes, don’t trust anyone but yourself. As has been said, there’s alternatives for that, including self-hosting.
Pixelfed’s advantages aren’t limited to potential privacy features though, which I agree would have been excellent items to raise in the article, such as a focus on photos and a complete lack of any algorithm forcing tailored content at you. But this is a how-to article, not a feature comparison. I’m sure we’ll see a prevalence of those in the future but it’s still early doors. I would argue that it literally does imply that Pixelfed is more privacy focused though - it’s right there in the title.