Designed and built for a better society, to bring us closer together without tracking or surveillance.
And the Kickstarter link is posted with a referral code.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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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.
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.
Is this why there was all the hate against 3rd party apps recently?
That was really something. Quite ironic for an open source advocate to be so angry with 3rd party apps
Didn't know about sup
Open source, modular, instant messenger. Coming soon! Made by @dansup (Proof: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/111493816842232424)
A big downside to fediverse messaging is that it isn't secure, and so we're warned when using it. Would anyone have more details on why we might use this over a more private messenger?
I wouldn’t hold your breath. He’s been promising it for a while, but nothing has come to fruition. I don’t blame him one single bit though, he is a single dev working on all these awesome projects and I just wish he’d be a little more realistic with how many projects he can actually keep up in the air.
I feel something as important and critical as an E2EE messenger would need someone watching it round the clock- it’s not a sort of release and forget thing is it
I don’t blame him one single bit though, he is a single dev working on all these awesome projects and I just wish he’d be a little more realistic with how many projects he can actually keep up in the air.
yeah, and instead of doing that he makes sure to remain the single dev and paints himself as the second coming of Steve Jobs.
I don't understand. These both already exist. What is the Kickstarter for?
It's almost like you could check out the linked campaign and answer that question with a couple of minutes reading.
The money goes to supporting pixelfed, loops and sup development, with the goal being financing full time development for the entire team.
It's almost like I already did read it and it didn't answer the question.
"Kickstarter" is supposed to be a crowdfunding campaign to "kickstart" a project, not string it along.
Oh no, someone is tarnishing the sacred name of a kickstarter campaign by checks notes raising money to scale up a project that can benefit everyone (thus kickstarting the scaling effort) instead of selling a $250 plastic brick that generates far-infrared waves using no electricity in order to "stabilise" your car's battery which you velcro the brick on top of (okay, that one was an IndieGoGo, but same difference).
Wow that looks like a scam.
That's my point: Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is filled with extraordinarily obvious scams, yet this person's trying to act like there'a some sanctity to the semantics rather than the spirit of them.
someone is tarnishing the sacred name of a kickstarter campaign
Wow. You really missed the mark on that one. I don't know why would you think I was making that point instead of the very clearly more sensible "it's not what it's for".
In other words, why don't they just have a donation page like everyone else?
My point being I see no reason why Kickstarter can't be for kickstarting the rapid scaling of a free, available-to-all project when it can be for rampant, unadulterated scams. This is easily within the spirit if not the letter of Kickstarter, unlike the scams which fit the letter but not the spirit.
Once again, not saying it "can't" be used for anything, it is just a strange choice because it's not "kickstarting" anything. The pupose of Kickstarter (and other crowdfunding sites) is to generate the necessary funds to bring something into existence. It's already going. It's like using it to sell products that are already on store shelves. Like, why do I need this? Why wouldn't I just go to the store and buy it? I don't understand the purpose.
In other words, why don't they just have a donation page like everyone else?
Dansup is a weirdo tbh someones gotta fork pixelfed and give it a better name
I've gotten some odd vibes from him (his recent posts hyping up Loops and Pixelfed have slightly manic energy to them), but I'm curious what you find weird about him.
Exactly that. He comes off as manic. Doesn't seem to be good at working with others. I just get a really bad vibe like he's doing it out of ego.
I don't have a lot of money. I have been unemployed for more than 1.5 years and I am already spending a lot of my parents' money to set up a small business. Still, I really want to support it. I will try to give like 5 dollars or so, just as a show of support.