A while ago joined Pixelfed, and some things really confuse me …
1.) Licenses … on my older posts, the Image shows a content license (like, CC BY-NC-SA), but not on newer ones … there doesn’t seem to be a way to specify a license, or is there?
2.) Followers … some friends joined on other instances, and we followed each other … when I click their profile from MY instance, then I see only myself (seems like they don’t have any other followers on that instance).
If I visit their profile on THEIR instance, I can see they have more followers, but I can’t see the details without logging in (and the account from my instance doesn’t work).
Is that by design?
I can’t even see their profile picture from my instance … my posts seem to show up in their feed though …
3.) I’m using the official app, but I can only see my most recent posts … I made a few posts about a year ago and they don’t show up …
Can someone enlighten me here?
Hmm in theory I get that, but in practice it’s not always easy to grasp.
When Fediverse stuff comes up as an “alternative” it’s often depicted as “leave Instagram, join Pixelfed” … not “join pixelfed.social” or “join pixelfed.de” … it’s often presented as if the instance you choose doesn’t matter that much. Which, is now pretty clear to me, is not true at all. It also seems a bit at odds with the idea of decentralization because if you want your content to be seen there’s a big incentive to join an already-large instance.
Apart from that, as a practical consequence, it’s hard to understand why, when and where you see something … like, a common point of criticism about corporate social media is that algorithms boost content in often hard-to-understand ways … but in the Fediverse, it just seems a different kind of intransparency, as long as you don’t just stick to your local instance.
Yes, discovering is easier on bigger instances. That’s why some smaller instances subscribe to relays, where the “magazine” gets copied to every other instance on that relay.
As soon as you follow accounts, you’ll get every magazine in chronological order though.