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Pixelfed #11 in Android app store
(feddit.org)
I almost never look at the app store but I popped in today in the wake of the TikTok ban and was shocked to see this.
pixelfed.social's starting to slow down. I think the growth's hitting it hard.
I appreciate that they offer more than their first party server on sign-up (unlike Mastodon) but the first party one is still at the top with nearly 4x the number of users than the next highest.
It should be simple enough to allow instances to opt into being shown and then shuffle them periodically.
I wonder if that actually helps their growth tho. When I first started joining lemmy I was put off by the contradictory instructions that it didn't really matter what instance I joined, but IT WAS VITALLY IMPORTANT that I pick the right one (because of "defederation" and "local communities" -- terms that meant nothing to me at the time.) But if you're joining pixelfed and you can choose either the overwhelmingly largest instance or a tiny one, then you're just going to pick the largest one.
does pixelfed not... uh... federate?
It does but like every federated service, it can also choose to defederate from another specific instance, and as a user you may or may not object to that.