well sort of: Vernissage is working on their standalone server and app, but i think they are pretty early in development. Used to be a pixelfed app but dan wasn't fixing stuff (i think? can't remember the drama there) so they made their own thing
alemi
joined 2 years ago
dansup is being all but trasparent, he's receiving money from nlnet (which he shouldn't since being open source is a requirement and loops published backend is just a project scaffolding, literally one hello world route). unhappy now he's asking money from a kickstarter, unclear for what since loops doesn't federate, doesn't have a web ui and is struggling scaling. pixelfed is a mess too, but now he got a surge of users so he's "the biggest instance on fedi" and needs more money to make bait products to cater to "digital refugees" he can lure in with clone UIs and lose 1 month later when they realize fedi is a whole other thing
we need better fedi dev accountability, please don't give more money to dansup, donate instead to mastodon or gotosocial or mitra, they're making a lot more innovative work for the fediverse
a bit shameless self bump but im working on upub. not feature complete yet but im daily driving it and it aims to be small, complete and cheap to run
(in case lemmy hides titles: direct reply above, this is more of a "acktually" rant)
i'd claim that instagram is a microblogging platform: your "blog" is a photo instead of 300 chars of text. implementation-wise, an "instagram fedi clone" is just a mastodon instance with >1 pic limit (rather than text) and that only shows you posts with attachments
because of this i'm rather stingy at "instagram clones" or "tiktok clones": they tend to be bait to grab users fast, and fail to deliver proper software. as OP notices, peertube is a perfect "tiktok clone" backend, the only thing it needs to be a "real" clone is an algorithm (good luck with that) and being able to scroll up/down videos in the frontend. there is zero benefit in reinventing the wheel from scratch with loops.video, as the focus ends up on "looking like tiktok" rather than "how do i serve super heavy content super fast to users without suffocating my infra". also the whole "dansup is at best sketchy and at worst abusive with his contributors".
so i'll ask you back: what do you want from an "instagram-like fedi app"? should it just require you to add a picture while posting and only show you posts with images? should put the image above the text? these requirements are fully clientside and don't require a separate server
i'm considering starting a kickstarter myself asking 1/10th of what dan is asking to make such an app, it's literally all UI. it would be 100% a petty move but fedi really needs to stop throwing money at sketchy devs. silverpill from mitra saw zero donations while doing the whole FEP thing, but dansup says "fedi tiktok" and gets 50k...