• wesley
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    6 hours ago

    Mastodon is an app for sharing text that can also share pictures and videos. Pixelfed is an app for sharing pictures and videos with limited text.

    You can curate a feed of pictures on Mastodon by following hashtags like #cats or #catstodon, but the interface is going to always emphasize the text first. Meanwhile on Pixelfed I can follow those same hashtags and get a much better experience for a feed primarily of pictures. Even though many/most of the posts will inevitably come from Mastodon users I can still browse those in my Pixelfed app in a much cleaner way. Artists can post their work from a Mastodon account, but the best way to view all their posts is going to be from Pixelfed.

    This is why interoperability is a good thing. The whole point of federation is that different apps can implement their own version of the spec to curate a different type of user experience.