Loops became Open Source!

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My fear with pixelfed and loops is the single dev seemingly more interested in money and clout than in building something long lasting for the community. I don't expect it to last long, but my friends really crave an app to exchange reels in and so we're hoping loops will be sufficient until something more stable comes around.

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He stirs a lot of shit on his Mastodon account and gets into spats with other fedi devs. Just the other day he got into a one-sided spat with the GtS dev because the GtS dev implemented a feature to randomise the number of active users, which led to goblin.technology topping pixelfed.social in the FediDB charts. He then accused them of doing this to undermine him specifically, of wanting to 'de-legitimize Pixelfeds growth', despite it being explicitly a privacy feature.

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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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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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Loops became Open Source!