[HN Gopher] Pixelfed Introduces Import from Instagram
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Pixelfed Introduces Import from Instagram
Author : rapnie
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-06-12 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pixelfed.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (pixelfed.blog)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > you can seamlessly transfer your photos, captions, and even
| hashtags
|
| that's rich, given that nobody has posted photos, captions and
| hashtags to their feed in 2 years
|
| Its all in the ephemeral stories now, or the reels
|
| Too late
| 7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote:
| good thing pixelfed supports stories
| yieldcrv wrote:
| They import old stories too? Import the highlight reel?
| Crosspost the current story?
|
| They could have included that in their blog post
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > given that nobody has posted photos, captions and hashtags to
| their feed in 2 years
|
| Well, let me throw my anecdata hat into this ring and point out
| that it is not "nobody" because I have a constantly refreshing
| feed of people posting just those things every day.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| He may be exagerating, but it is also my experience. The only
| "posts" i see are from entities that have something to sell.
| The "regular" users just do stories now (probably because of
| the disappearing nature of them). 2 anecdata, i guess.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Yeah it was hyperbole based on that observation, I'm glad
| someone that can relate chimed in
| not2b wrote:
| I regularly post photos from my hikes to Instagram. I've never
| used the story feature. But I've been accused of being a nobody
| before.
|
| I might consider importing them to Pixelfed, but only a few
| friends are in the fediverse now, and most aren't.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Photos are alive and well on IG, not sure if you are thinking
| of a different app.
| kredd wrote:
| Depends on the generation, but it's "not cool" to post photos
| like we used to do it every week or so in my generation
| (younger millennials / older gen-z). I've seen some people
| doing once every month, quarter, or life altering events to
| give a big "fan out" news to their friends, but that's it.
| monsieurgaufre wrote:
| It's what i'm seeing as well. In my circle, IG is used to
| share memes and very rarely personal news (except for the
| oversharers).
| xnx wrote:
| I'm a big fan of liberating data (especially my own!) from walled
| gardens, but I have to assume that whatever they're doing is
| against Instagram's terms and Instagram will do everything to
| stop/break this.
| naillo wrote:
| The startup strategy of knowingly breaking laws for brand
| awareness and picking up some users like this and then removing
| it once you get caught.
| zeruch wrote:
| I guess its good they arent a startup then?
| DANmode wrote:
| They have an app that federates with ActivityPub/Mastadon,
| not a startup (that I have seen).
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >walled gardens
|
| This is marketing speak. Do not call it walled gardens. Called
| it curated, fixed, whatever.
|
| Gardens have delicious fruits, vegetables, and beautiful
| flowers. It creates a positive emotional spin on what is
| otherwise something bad for consumers.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Clearly you've not seen most gardens.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Instagram (Facebook graph) API allows extraction of data and
| "Sharing to/from other platforms" is (currently) an accepted
| use.
| not2b wrote:
| It would appear that you assume incorrectly. Instagram will let
| you dump all your data into a JSON. All Pixelfed is doing is
| reading that JSON. Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that
| would block them from reading in that JSON.
| smashah wrote:
| > Pixelfed has no contract with Meta
|
| As a victim of Meta's Cease and Desists for open-wa, the
| contract terms is in the Terms of Service that anyone
| associated with Pixelfed, or anyone associated with the
| development of Pixelfed has ever accepted regardless if it's
| a personal or testing account.
|
| In these ToS agreements, Meta believes they can prevent
| anyone making any tools that they deem break any of their
| ridiculous terms of service.
|
| I literally had to stop working on my OSS project/tool due to
| this bullying. Unfortunately I, or other Devs, do not have
| enough resources to fight this immoral megacorp so therefore
| they win our compliance.
| nfriedly wrote:
| > Pixelfed has no contract with Meta that would block them
| from reading in that JSON.
|
| I think they're using OAuth to connect the accounts, and I
| believe Meta requires developers click through some agreement
| to do that.
|
| Edit: I was wrong, see below.
| Stephen304 wrote:
| There is no oauth involved, the import works by requesting
| your instagram zip archive and then selecting the
| downloaded zip file in Pixelfed. You can check out the code
| here: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/blob/dev/resourc
| es/asse...
|
| The neat thing is that it unzips the file locally and only
| uploads the posts you select, which Dansup says helped get
| around very large instagram archives and also means you
| don't have to worry about posts you don't want imported
| being sent to the pixelfed server.
| zeruch wrote:
| IG has to allow an export function, if nothing else to help
| with compliance (e.g. CCPA) and in a digestible format. All PF
| has done is built a parser for said JSON formatting.
| hbn wrote:
| From what I read in another comment, it takes advantage of the
| data export function Instagram themselves offer
| yosito wrote:
| Cool feature. But the blog post neglects to mention how to find
| and use it.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| The captcha to sign up shows AI-generated images and asks things
| like "select images of a dog" but there are zero dogs, just dog
| approximations. I really hope these identifications won't be used
| as training data.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Pick the pixels that came from a dog.
| [deleted]
| infinityio wrote:
| hCaptcha has been doing this for a few months now to my
| knowledge - I'm guessing this is being used to train a CLIP-
| like system (or alternatively: it might just be that poorly
| generated ai images are the best candidate for a captcha in the
| age of modern subject recognition, it's hard to know)
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Gamechanger
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Countdown to Instagram banning this: 9... 8... 7...
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Insta has to comply with European law.
| dchuk wrote:
| I feel like all of these decentralized attempts to respond to the
| ills of social media/social products are going to never make it
| out of the curious POC phase simply because the vast vast
| majority of people do not care about hosting their own instances
| or owning their data to that degree.
|
| When it comes down to it, there are 3 key issues with the
| "traditional" model of social products:
|
| You are the product - This is true of 1) your data you put into
| the system explicitly, 2) the data you create by using the
| system, and 3) the predominant business model (ads) of these
| products. This could be fixed by:
|
| 1) some easy means to extract all data you create in an
| accessible format (only some users will care about this)
|
| 2 & 3) Allowing people the choice of whether they are the product
| or not. "Subscribe for no ads" seems like a good middle path
| alternative to selling ads without demanding a whole new
| architecture and operational model for federated solutions.
|
| Separate of the above ideas is the fact that social products are
| really addiction mechanisms. Reddit/Hacker News/Tik Tok/Instagram
| are all heavily optimized to addict their users to their product.
| This is, in my opinion, where the real risk lies overall, because
| it is directly leading to aggressive micro feedback loops and
| information bubbles that are evolving faster than humans can
| process. I'm not sure what to do about this problem save for
| outright control/limitation attempts, which seems like a
| guaranteed mess.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Allowing people the choice of whether they are the product
| or not. "Subscribe for no ads" seems like a good middle path
| alternative to selling ads without demanding a whole new
| architecture and operational model for federated solutions._
|
| The main problem with social media as it exists today is not
| advertising (as much as I despise advertising), but the toxic,
| addictive, engagement-at-all-costs nature of how the
| information is presented.
|
| I agree with you that most people don't care about their data
| ownership/privacy to the point that they'll host their own
| instances. And if they don't do that, then they are beholden to
| whatever "algorithms" the centralized players want to use to
| ensure high levels of engagement that keep people on the
| site/app, and coming back to the site/app.
| munificent wrote:
| But it's the advertising that drives all of the stuff you do
| hate.
|
| When a business is ad-driven, human attention is the raw
| crude that it harvests to turn into a product (ad
| impressions) that it then generates revenue from. The more
| attention it can siphon up, the more ad impressions it can
| deliver and the more money the business makes.
|
| Does your coffee maker chime every twenty minutes to
| helpfully suggest you might want another coffee? No, of
| course not. Because the people who made that coffee maker
| already got as much money from you as they're gonna get when
| you bought it. As long as you're happy enough with it to not
| switch to the competition, they _don 't care how much you use
| it_. They get no additional revenue from your additional use.
|
| With ad-driven businesses, every user is a potentially
| inexhaustible source of future attention, which is what
| drives all of these toxic user experience choices.
| muglug wrote:
| The vast majority of users absolutely don't care about data
| residency or "privacy", however you interpret that word. You
| can convince individuals to care, but good luck convincing a
| large group.
|
| What can happen (and has happened) is that the existing thing
| becomes just toxic enough to lessen the pull and invite
| alternatives. For the tech communities I've been a part of this
| has happened a number of times in the history of the web -- off
| the top of my head:
|
| * ExpertsExchange -> StackOverflow
|
| * IE 6 -> Firefox
|
| * Twitter -> Mastodon
|
| In all cases the migration was driven by software engineers'
| disgust with the platform. The current Twitter -> Mastodon
| migration is mostly just folks in tech, but there are enough of
| us to forge decent-sized communities there.
| copperx wrote:
| Wait, does Mastodon have traction?
| yborg wrote:
| Relative to what? It currently has ~1.2M monthly active
| users, or less than 0.5% of Twitter. It's probably 20x the
| active user base of IRC.
| ImaCake wrote:
| It has enough traction that it's a vibrant set of
| communities. I use it to share bird photos, talk about
| adhd/autism, and follow some climate science. Its smaller
| than twitter, but its big enough to work now.
| kelnos wrote:
| And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share,
| and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft
| was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google
| wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free,
| advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in
| that direction.
|
| Google allows Firefox to exist (by funding Mozilla via
| Firefox's default search engine) only so they can point to
| the fact that there are alternatives, with alternative
| rendering engines.
|
| It is unclear if Mastodon will actually replace Twitter. I'm
| skeptical. I think Twitter would have to actually fail (as
| in, go bankrupt, or at least have such severe technical
| uptime/stability issues) before the platform would be
| abandoned enough to definitively say Mastodon won.
|
| ExpertsExchange -> SO mainly happened because all the decent
| answers on EE were hidden behind a paywall.
| jxf wrote:
| ExpertsExchange was before my time, but was it "toxic" or was
| it just simply not as good?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| It was significantly less useful -- answers were behind a
| paywall.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| Hosting your own instance isn't a requirement for joining any
| of the alternatives I've seen so far (e.g. Bluesky, Mastodon,
| Lemmy etc.) but I'm open to being corrected if you've seen this
| stipulated. As for the rest of this comment, it's really
| predicated on certain ideas about what websites _have_ to be
| based on what they have been over the past 15 years. In fact it
| 's highly possible to participate in community-run efforts that
| aren't driven by profit incentives, which also don't aspire to
| drive addiction.
| interroboink wrote:
| While I am also not very bullish on any fedi-xyz that requires
| special extra effort from users, I think there's another
| problem with the current popular schemes that makes your (2&3)
| solution problematic: money incentives, over time.
|
| Even if a company today were to offer "subscribe for no ads", I
| don't have especially great confidence that it will stay that
| way, or that the quality of the product will be maintained over
| time. Fundamentally, if you have a situation where making money
| is the goal (whether via ads or subscriptions, etc), then that
| is the goal that will be pursued. But a healthy community is
| _not_ about money.
|
| One way to "keep the money-grubbing company honest", as it
| were, is to have genuine competition. Maybe there are other
| good ways, but that's at least one. There needs to be an
| existential threat to that company, at all times, that its
| users (and thus revenue) could leave and go somewhere else. A
| federated approach at least somewhat pushes things in that
| direction. I'm curious to see how much traction it gains.
|
| Maybe there could be a non-profit approach. Or maybe "online
| community as a public utility" approach; I really don't know.
| But the money-driven incentive tends to be a slow poison, I
| think.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Update your Pixelfed app or access the web version to take
| advantage of this groundbreaking feature today!
|
| Impressive. I also appreciate supporting both web and app
| version.
|
| Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about how it
| worked it practice.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Did anyone try it out already? I'd love to hear more about
| how it worked it practice.
|
| Just tried it but it's not a direct import - it's "dump your
| data from Instagram as JSON[1] and we'll import that JSON".
| i.e. a one-off backup restore.
|
| (If ActivityPub allowed backdated posts, I'd do the sync myself
| from my instaloader downloads but alas, most servers do not.)
|
| [1] "It may take up to 14 days to collect this information and
| send it to you."
| tedunangst wrote:
| Nothing in ActivityPub cares about whether a post is back
| dated. How would it even know? Maybe it's just an old post.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Apologies, should have been clearer that it's the MastoAPI
| which has no concept of backdated posts - or even of
| creating dated posts at all. [1] has no `created_at` or any
| other (useful) timestamp. Hence having to local-patch my
| Akkoma to allow passing `created_at` for my backfill needs.
|
| [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/statuses/#create
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Got my download - 2.4GB. Uploaded it - Safari chugs badly
| here.
|
| If you leave that tab at all, it breaks and restarts which
| cancels the import process.
|
| Once it's uploaded the file, Pixelfed wants you to tap each
| image you want to import in a 3-wide scrolling grid and
| there's no "select all" I can see. Plus it is now DOG SLOW.
|
| I have 9052 Instagram posts. Bugger that, frankly, because
| I'm not spending upwards of 3 hours clicking on a web page to
| import photos.
|
| In summary - nice idea badly implemented.
|
| [edit: Tried it in Chrome. Upload is much smoother and more
| reliable but still no "select all" and it still chugs like a
| 1970s PC - a good 30s between clicking and the image being
| selected.]
| Stephen304 wrote:
| It looks like the instagram->pixelfed import actually
| preserves the original post's date. Dansup imported a post
| from 2016 and it shows up as "7y ago" in my mastodon UI.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Oh yeah, if you have direct access to the database /
| backend admin (as I'm sure this importer does), you can
| frob things to get the correct dates and avoid pushing them
| out as new posts. Just not possible via the standard APIs
| at the moment (I had to patch my Akkoma to allow
| backfilling of posts from certain accounts.)
| james_pm wrote:
| Trying it now...it will only let you import 100 photos at a
| time, and you need to single select each one (My Instagram has
| hundreds and hundreds of photos going back a decade).
|
| So far nothing has actually imported. Not sure how long I
| should wait.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| I have to admit their UX and UI are superior among all
| fediverse apps.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| nice
| greedo wrote:
| I've been using Pixelfed since I discovered it after Elon bought
| Twitter. It's helped me get back into photography and I post
| daily. Of course the userbase is tiny compared to Insta, but I
| don't care.
| zeruch wrote:
| I'd rather grown a small but sincerely interested community
| around my work, than a large, mostly indifferent one.
|
| When I was still active on DeviantArt regularly, but before I
| got Gallery Director status (2004-2008 ish) I sold little
| prints, but consistently. After GD, I overall sold about
| double, but the interaction was like an EKG, and full of noise
| and stupid complaints and random stats-whoring from commenters.
| It felt like too much of a rollercoaster managing whatever
| turdstorm may or may not arise.
|
| I'm still trying to bootstrap a regular pace with PF, as I'm
| still a very active IG user, but I may just test out if the
| Import function can handle JSON file with over 10K posts...
| greedo wrote:
| Yeah, I joke with my daughters that I have EIGHT followers,
| and my financial windfall is just around the corner.
|
| I used to do quite a bit of photog and even majored in
| visarts, but lost interest until recently. Nice to have
| something simple like daily posting reinvigorate an old
| interest. It's like writers who have to write every day.
| After a while you get decent at it.
| zeruch wrote:
| I started posting my art online 20 years ago with
| DeviantArt and my original blogging efforts, but it was
| predicated on the fact that I had an art practice for my
| own edification, so the online part just became an adjunct
| aspect. I was "gonna art" regardless, so why not syndicate
| what that is, regardless of what it generates.
|
| Keeping that attitude has been healthy in terms of what I
| produce, but I do find that I would prefer to be using a
| service that allows for some actual community elements,
| which DevArt has allowed to go fallow, and other sites
| never quite had (e.g. Society6) but at least have good
| artist services (e.g. prints)
| nfriedly wrote:
| That's awesome, congrats Pixelfed team!
|
| The next thing I'd like to see is a way to make it ongoing -
| specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup of
| my wife's Instagram account. She posts a lot of things that are
| relevant to our family, and it'd be nice to know we'll still have
| it even if something were to happen to her account.
|
| It also sounds like Stories are not currently imported. That
| makes sense for a one-time import since they are meant to be
| ephemeral, but for an ongoing importer/backup, it would be nice
| to capture those as well.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > specifically I'd like to have a automatically updated backup
| of my wife's Instagram account.
|
| Instaloader is pretty good for backing up Instagram accounts
| but it's easy to trigger Instagram's anti-bot protections using
| it. I use a secondary account to avoid locking out my main and
| even then it took ~4 days to download my 9k posts because of
| the lockouts and rate-limiting. But once you've got the main
| bulk down, you can run it once a day to fill in anything new
| and that's pretty reliable.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Thanks, I'll try that out.
| Kab1r wrote:
| The thing that annoys me is that there is no propper way (at
| least to my knowledge) to run multiple linked fedi accounts. I
| have a selfhosted misskey instance, but then should I also run
| pixelfed? Or should I just use the singular instance?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Everyone just has multiple accounts, but I'd say it still works
| better than having separate twitter, instagram, reddit, and
| youtube accounts. You may need a peertube account to post a
| video, but just about anyone can comment if they like. Can't
| comment on a youtube video from twitter.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| To be fair, you can comment on a Twitter video from Twitter
| :-)
| kevincox wrote:
| I have the same problem. I would love to be able to toot from
| mastodon and post videos from PeerTube to the same account.
| Right now it is very segmented, even though most fediverse apps
| can process incoming posts of various formats (so you can
| follow PeerTube users from Mastodon no problem) but you can
| only post a limited set of content. They have mixed identity
| and applications.
| iameli wrote:
| This is where the Web3 ecosystem is ahead right now. One
| address, log into a hundred different apps with the same
| wallet identity.
| 3np wrote:
| I've been toying around with the idea of an ActivityPub
| proxy/aggregator/delegation which would "front" all your
| services and act as a unified identity for the proxied
| instances.
|
| It would inherently require trust, so the only way it would
| scale beyond self-hosters controlling their own domain would be
| co-hosted alongside some SSO-unified fedi services (or if S2S
| delegation becomes an adopted thing).
|
| (If you run with this idea, consider AGPL for all parts :))
| ktosobcy wrote:
| I wanted to use pixelfed (for my personal needs) but discovered
| there is no easily deployable docker image so I gave up... shame.
| Croftengea wrote:
| TIL Pixelfed exists. It's a pretty small network though, they say
| they have 163K users. They need some stupid Instagram policy
| change to get more traction.
| mxuribe wrote:
| With all due respect, I'm going to nitpick a portion of your
| comment there... While the 163k users might accurately describe
| pixelfed...that is, pixelfed users, that doesn't even begin to
| describe "the network"... which is composed of millions of
| fediverse users. Your comment was like saying that email is not
| that big of a network because there are only X numbers of
| thunderbird users. Again, all due respect. But pixelfed is only
| one of many ways to be present on, and interact with millions
| of people on the fediverse. ;-)
| Croftengea wrote:
| Point taken, thanks for explaining!
| [deleted]
| rglullis wrote:
| No. Pixelfed is part of the Fediverse. You can follow anyone
| and be followed from Mastodon, Pleroma. This means that we have
| already almost 10M users to interact with. [0]
|
| Stop thinking in terms of silos and start embracing the re-
| emergence of the World Wide Web.
|
| [0] https://fedidb.org/
| Kye wrote:
| One of the cool benefits of federation. I've already seen a
| bunch of Lemmy/kbin instances instantly have a bustling,
| unique community because people could post to and follow
| communities from Mastodon.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Agreed. As a developer it's also a lot of fun because i can
| toy with creating my own platform and depending on the
| compatibility i choose to opt into -- ie
| Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin -- i get interop and i don't create a
| silo. I absolutely love that.
|
| I suspect there's tons of issues with ActivityPub, ranging
| from inefficiency of synchronization to discovery of
| instances, but those are things we can evolve for
| ActivityPub.
|
| But i absolutely adore that creating a new platform with
| unique features can still be compatible with the larger
| ecosystem. It's like creating a new Reddit client
| (Apollo/etc) but it can have new features like shared
| economy or integration to PixelFeed/Mastodon/etc.
|
| Despite not loving some things i'm about inefficiencies
| ActivityPub, i adore what it's giving us. I hope we run
| with it.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Does Pixelfed have rigorous instance blocking?
|
| I don't want the very nasty users of that 10M to interact
| with me or my friends.
|
| This is just opening everyone to harassment we didn't ask
| for.
|
| Just looking for an open source Instagram alternative to
| convince my friends to move to.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| If mods see harassment, they can block such user or use
| broader preventive measures, including defederation. As
| with any other Fediverse software.
| rglullis wrote:
| Instance blocking depends on the admin. If you are not
| happy with the moderation of the instance you are on, you
| can always host your own.
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