We’ve just spun up a brand new photo sharing instance, based on Vernissage. It’s similar to pixelfed, but more focused on photography (as opposed to general image and short video sharing).
Signups are open. Currently, it mandates an email address, but you can stick whatever you like in there, and it will be automatically verified. Signups do require approval, but you can also generate invites that (I believe) bypass the requirement for approval.
Anyway, you can check it out at https://photos.blahaj.zone/
As a consequence, we will be taking down our pixelfed instance. We’ll leave it up until the end of August to give people a chance to migrate, but honestly, it had really low activity in any case, so it shouldn’t have too much of an impact on people.
Vernissage may also end up having low activity, but even if it does, I like it so much more than pixelfed, that we’ll keep it running even if it’s just me using it :)
I’ll ask you in a few months how the experience with hosting it is 😅
Do you know something I don’t?
No, but I hope you know something in a few months that could be interesting for me 😅
Well, it’s in beta so far, and there are a few little quirks, but so far so good :)
Sal Grover is an example of the indoctrination process the TERF movement has perfected.
Giggle, when it was first released, allowed trans women, but it also used an automated facial recognition system to decide who was a woman and who wasn’t. There was quite a bit of pushback about that, especially with the fact that the system was far from perfect, and excluded many women, particularly trans women. They put in a process to manually approve signups from people who were rejected by the facial recognition system, but that was slow and more invasive of people’s privacy.
Sal Grover at this point, doubled down on the facial recognition aspect, and the pushback against it also increased.
And then the TERFs came in. They told Grover that she was doing the right thing with her facial recognition system, and the fact it was screwing over trans women didn’t matter. And the next thing you know, Grover just bans trans women from the app, and starts actively spouting TERF transphobic talking points, and over the next few years becomes an important figure in TERF circles in Australia…
Was this supposed to be a reply to another thread?
blahaj photos
looks inside
photos are mostly not blahaj photos
I absolutely need to create a blahaj category so that any blahaj photos that come through don’t get missed!
Done! And our first shonk has now rolled in!
Very cool!
Can you describe more about Vernissage vs Pixelfed?
Vernissage is built to be about photography specifically.
This is the vernissage home feed vs the pixelfed home feed
Also, we can compare the individual photo views. Notably though, the EXIF data is only available for photos shared on the same instance, pixelfed doesn’t know what do with it, and the Vernissage dev hasn’t decided how to federate it yet.
Vernissage and PIxelfed both have trending views, where you can see the content that is getting the most favs/activity, but Vernissage also has an “Editors choice” section, which is a hand curated section, that lets anyone with admin/mod powers select images to be showcased.
And Vernissage has categories, which can be selected manually when uploading a photo, or are assigned automatically for federated photos. The auto assignment is based on the associated hashtags, and admins have full control over them, and are able to create new categories, and change which tags are assigned to which categories.
Those last two features particularly make for some beautiful photography that is easy to find for new users.
This is the Editors’s choice view
And the categories view
