Right now, go to pixelfed.org and there's a "Join" button in the top right corner, click on that and there's a message telling me "To join Pixelfed, you need to pick an instance. You can find a list of instances on the sites below." - click on either of those and it's a completely baffling list of stuff with no obvious way to continue. At this point I always give up.
Hah, you're right, you end up in some slow-loading dashboard (hooray fancy graphed realtime numbers!). I clicked on a random hostname, it's another dashboard page with the hostname in large, the same hostname as a link as a subtitle. I clicked the link, and hey, it's a page that looks like Instagram's sign up page, with the difference being that this one says:
"Registrations are closed."
I tried a few more sites, even the one with the most number of users, and they all say this. Only the 5th site I clicked on allows me to register.
Ah only now do I notice the column "Open Signups" in their fancy dashboard...
That being said, it's open source, so there are hacks to make your stream public. But they're hacks, and you're not going to get that out of the box.
You can even follow me from your instance. You can't get more public than that.
I wish (hope?) something simple like this is supported in a linux picture viewing application, and I just don't know which one it is. Can a line or two of text be stored in an EXIFish field? Has someone already written a script to take care of this?
But back to the main point - this is a great app and I can see myself using it to share photos with friends and family. Thanks for making it :)
[1] https://mpv.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip [3] https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer/blob/master/mpv...
That might be more involved than you want, but given the structure of this project I don't know of a better way.
Only thing it is missing for me is support for videos. But I know videos are pain to self-host and if you use embedded player from YouTube or Vimeo then it kills the aesthetics.
However, Google Photos covers an aspect that this does not: it syncs the photos _off_ my phone into an online stream.
I actually use Google Photos because it's the only way of getting photos off your phone. The only other mechanism is iCloud, but if you don't have a Mac, there's no way to read from it.
For static gallery generation, I use a project called sitelen-mute.
https://github.com/kensanata/sitelen-mute
No affiliation with either tools.
I have found this though, which lets me fetch the photos via iClouds (I guess I prefer that to google, and I can script it rather than do it via the web).
On Android something like Syncthing could be better for the job.
I would be happy to pay money to make this work properly.
In the meantime, I pay extra for Google Photos (for display/search/tagging) and iCloud (for reliable auto backup) and need to find a way to automatically download the iCloud things to my Plex/NAS machine.
(Using github to host my photos was my thought as well)
