Hello! I drink water.
Good point! I’ve edited my original post to clarify my intention behind bringing up the Patreon.
Overall, the main point I’m trying to make is that the man has a history of chronic project hopping and being hostile to other people who want to contribute to his projects. The goal was not to say that he should be able to fund his entire project via Patreon, but rather that I don’t know he’s the best person to spearhead three fedi platforms at once.
I reaaallllly would urge people not to get involved with this kickstarter. He gave similar lists of things he would do with the money he’s been receiving from his backers on his Patreon for years. He never had enough money from his patreon to do that and the claims should not have been made. (I’ve also noticed how on his posts about the kickstarter he goes out of his way to say his work is “entirely self funded”) Instead he’s been jumping from project to project and has been incredibly awful toward folks who want to help improve the stuff he’s neglected.
Take it as a red flag that he’s still the only dev actively working on three incredibly half baked fedi apps, and if you can, look through his mastodon profile to see the kinds of things he says. Check the GitHub issues for Pixelfed and how long some of the most basic ones have been sitting there for.
I genuinely do hope this kickstarter yields something the Patreon I supported does not, as I still run a Pixelfed instance and like it conceptually. But the software itself has been and only gets more broken, and given the way he has privately treated the pixelfed-glitch team all the while publicly acting like he’s been great to and is actively working with them, I really don’t think this dude is acting in especially good faith.
Edit: Took feedback from a reply and clarified the intention behind my point about his Patreon.
There’s an in-dev app called Relatica for iOS that you can get TestFlight access to. It’s quite good!
Absolutely! I’m genuinely hoping for the best because I like the idea behind Pixelfed. 🤞
It’s hard to say, but I’m not anticipating anything myself. Dude seems to be more interested in making flashy branded announcements than developing the thing to a working state.
What I will say is, he’s has for the last several years just under 400 Patreon backers (one of which was me), which was intended to give him funding to bring Pixelfed to a state of relative completion.
In that time he effectively abandoned Pixelfed to work on Loops (which is also in a really rough state and I anticipate will be similarly abandoned for Sup once he runs out of things to ‘announce’ for it), and now that Pixelfed has suddenly gotten this wave of attention, he’s talking about launching a Kickstarter to actually do the thing this time.
He has also been privately very hostile to groups such as the devs of Pixelfed-glitch, which were formed to continue development of Pixelfed, all while publicly stating that he is embracing it with open arms and sharing the development with that team.
He also responds to criticisms of these behaviours with posts like the ones I’ve attached here.
Source: Have been a Pixelfed instance admin for about five years, know several of the pf-glitch devs (who are all mostly server admins), and have been fairly active in the GitHub issues.
Yup. Been following Dan for a while and this has only gotten worse. Problem is, his attitude absolutely informs the way he manages and handles his projects. Even one glance at the issues page for Pixelfed shows that.
I think at some point, a lot of the Fedi will realise that toxicity and hopefully we’ll see fork efforts like Pixelfed-glitch get more support. Because Pixelfed and Loops are good ideas, executed by someone who really doesn’t have the ability to properly execute on them. I don’t anticipate that these current user numbers will stay given the current, quite broken, state of Pixelfed.
Pixelfed still has to fix really basic stuff first. Like pulling changed profile pics from remote instances, federating properly and consistently, not having three different UIs from different stages of development at once, making sure settings do what they’re supposed to do…
Wildly, people still think that about working at Apple, for now. I do see that changing slowly too though.