Loops became Open Source!

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New to open source? Good ideas don't really die in open source. If loops.video or Pixelfed are good ideas, open source will just do its thing because no one owns the idea once it goes open source

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lmaoooo thats so petty what

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Good ideas absolutely do die all the time even in open source. If the original dev doesn't want to play nice, it's actually pretty difficult to create a new fork that everyone will agree on. Hopefully these federated apps have enough inertia to prevent the userbase from splintering when the original devs move on.

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This seems to be the main issues with his apps. Visibility is scarce beyond the original post, wherein even with followers the chances of someone seeing your post beyond that honeymoon phase dwindles.

The only exception are users with lots of followers. From what I've seen in my brief time using Pixelfed for example, it's usually accounts with at least a few hundred followers that see a highet retention of visibility.

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The web ui has no option to even view the feed, as far as I can tell. Only individual videos and the settings.

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Building an app like this for 100 people, sure. Making something handle smooth, affordable video delivery at scale. That's a spicy meatball.

The front-end is a mess for testing but doable. Then if you do live, you've got proxies and stream copies.

I host stuff at great scale, it's a different beast.

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My favourite part about this is that Pixelfed has been misreporting stats for years, and still is.

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What's a good idea I'm open source that did die? I'm sure you can find a GitHub project and be like "I like this idea and it's dead" fine. But these projects are so used and popular... they aren't going anywhere. That's the context of this discussion. These apps are fine if the dev leaves because they are open source now. The right people will continue the work of this guy goes I think.

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Remember it's a solo dev still. I guess a nice weekend project would be to create a new material3 app for it

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Of course, my problem is just that he isn't being transparent, and is dishonest. If he actually made the code open source, and did not get himself into controversy all time i wouldn't mind him being a solo dev

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For following through?

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Yeah "open source"...
The app doesn't even have the source code...

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Isn't the point of this thread that the code isn't actually open source - that the released code isn't anything substantial?

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I see the backend and front end released. The back end is AGPL and the front end does need a license (assumed it had one, my bad). Assuming he puts the same AGPL license on the front end, I don't see anything unsubstantial? The community gets to make squooshloops or whatever name comes up and the backend and front end belongs to them at that point to release on their hardware. It's all ActivityPub, so mastodon users wouldn't miss see a thing go wrong? I'm not seeing a problem honestly

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Huh. Thank you for explaining.

I really don't know what to make of that, I can see why folks would find that really frustrating

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Well that's great news if you're right. It doesn't change that the creator seems to be immature and therefore not the most reliable social media Steward, but if the SW keeps getting developed or a better system comes from the open source nature as you suggest then I'll be happy.

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Yeah, this one guy has been trying to jumpstart so many projects. And that's admirable, but it's also too much for one dude (and I know he's tried to get some other people, but there has been drama around that - by him, I think).

But more to your point - something feels a little off even though I can't confirm anything. It does feel like this guy might just take some money and run if given the chance.

And I don't necessarily blame him for that - I probably would too. I don't want to work, and if I had money I wouldn't.

But there's just this feeling I can't shake about all of it. And I have a Pixelfed and a Loops account. They are both fine, so we'll see, I guess. But I wouldn't be surprised if I end back up with Mastodon being my sole social place for sharing photos, for example.

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A few days ago he posted (then I think deleted) this, which among other things makes me extremely inclined to not believe anything he says:

In March 2019 I teased the Pixelfed mobile app.
The only problem was, I didn't know how to write one.
So just like the original "federated instagram" post, I faked a commercial to build hype.
It was coming along well.
Then in mid 2020, I came out and put the app aside. It wasn't until late 2022 that I found a Pixelfed react native app, and cloned it and tinkered.
In 2023 I released the first Pixelfed app, but it was slow. I rewrote it from scratch in May 2024.
From faking, to making!

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Well, it's kind of up to him. His NLNet grants require it to be open source and dictate what license he uses, but I don't know the details to know if that just means it has to be open sourced in order to receive the grant (awarded upon completion not ahead of time) or right away.

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wtf? Thanks for sharing this, i didn't know.

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Loops became Open Source!