Pixelfed & Loops Kickstarter Campaign Just Launched

To celebrate the release of the Pixelfed Mobile app going live on the Apple App Store & Google Play Store, we’re proud to be launching our first Kickstarter campaign. All funds raised will go toward continued development and support of the core Pixelfed Foundation applications and the ActivityPub ecosystem at large.

The Pixelfed Team builds open source and ethical social networks for the masses. We aim to be the first Fediverse app with a billion people by taking on the worlds biggest players using open source standards. Designed and built for a better society, to bring us closer together without tracking or surveillance.

Edit: They met their funding goal!!! 🎉

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I reaaallllly would urge people not to get involved with this kickstarter. He gave similar lists of things he would do with the money he’s been receiving from his backers on his Patreon for years. He never had enough money from his patreon to do that and the claims should not have been made. (I’ve also noticed how on his posts about the kickstarter he goes out of his way to say his work is “entirely self funded”) Instead he’s been jumping from project to project and has been incredibly awful toward folks who want to help improve the stuff he’s neglected.
Take it as a red flag that he’s still the only dev actively working on three incredibly half baked fedi apps, and if you can, look through his mastodon profile to see the kinds of things he says. Check the GitHub issues for Pixelfed and how long some of the most basic ones have been sitting there for.
I genuinely do hope this kickstarter yields something the Patreon I supported does not, as I still run a Pixelfed instance and like it conceptually. But the software itself has been and only gets more broken, and given the way he has privately treated the pixelfed-glitch team all the while publicly acting like he’s been great to and is actively working with them, I really don’t think this dude is acting in especially good faith.
Edit: Took feedback from a reply and clarified the intention behind my point about his Patreon.
- Well that's a bit disappointing.
- Another relevant post: https://lemmy.world/post/24487031
  
  I have no horse in this race and tend to believe the poster, but those comments have no context and make no sense to me.
  
  That doesn't really seem that bad, but Dan's New Year's resolution really ought to be not posting while drinking. Every time something like that happens, it's invariably 3am local time and he's been smoking weed and having a few drinks. It's not a great look for him or his projects. No one's at their best drunk at 3am.
- It's kind of misleading to express it in number of backers. How much is it? Is it 400 people donating $100 each? It could be a lot! The lowest tier on his Patreon is $1.50. He was getting about $1200/mo. which is used for all of his projects.
  Who can believe that he wasn't able to meet his lofty goals with $1200 (Canadian!) while working entirely in the downtime from his unrelated full-time job?
  Pixelfed just passed Lemmy and is now the 4th largest server software by user count. By MAU, it's the 2nd largest and is about 25% the size of Mastodon. Do you know what Mastodon pulls in every month? Based on their most recent financial report, about $40,000. They're 4 times the size but getting nearly 40 times the amount in donations.
  Do you know how much Stux pulls in every month for running mstdn.social (and a couple other things)? Almost $4000/mo.
  Mstdn.social:
  Accounts: 251,174
  MAU: 17,528
  Pixelfed.social:
  Accounts: 272,979
  MAU: 157,829
  I wonder where all the money's going...
  edit: sass level adjustment.
  
  Good point! I’ve edited my original post to clarify my intention behind bringing up the Patreon.
  Overall, the main point I’m trying to make is that the man has a history of chronic project hopping and being hostile to other people who want to contribute to his projects. The goal was not to say that he should be able to fund his entire project via Patreon, but rather that I don’t know he’s the best person to spearhead three fedi platforms at once.
  
  I agree that it's just too much for a single person to do.
  FWIW, his stated medium-term goal is to hand sup and loops off to other people once they've launched.

46 comments