Pixelfed's first plateau in progress (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Sergio@slrpnk.net to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Looks like Pixelfed's growth spurt is slowing down. Absent any new external stimuli I'm guessing it'll stabilize around 200K to 300K monthly active users -- over a hundredfold order of magnitude from what it was just a month ago.

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[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 0 points 2 weeks ago

I've been trying to set it up for 2 weeks now, the docker containers. There are so many backwards decisions, it's pretty clear he doesn't understand docker unfortunately. The entire app could be a snap to set up, but it's such a convoluted setup that it scares a lot of people away. (It pretty much is scripted assuming you will run it on a VM, and a high cost one at that).

The fact that it's built on PHP and Laravel in 2025 says a lot, and the fact that he started Loops this year on the same architecture also says a lot. It just doesn't scale, it's locked to a single host, and he's finding that as the servers are tipping over.

[-] jonathan@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not a PHP fan but it scales better than Python or Ruby (Mastodon) does. I think Dan is a cowboy of an engineer, but blaming performance on his stack choice is a bad take.

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Haven’t tried self hosting Pixelfed. Just mostly been trying it out on the main instance. I’m really shocked that it’s a mess to deploy with docker if it’s on PHP/Laravel.

I hate PHP these days for dev purposes but I think laravel ought to be able to scale enough to run most Pixelfed instances. Facebook ran PHP when it was much larger than Pixelfed.