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  Spread Your Wings - Queen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyd6OLyhPJo #np

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  I love when people get impressed by my work, and say stuff like they can't believe one person did all this. As a high school dropout that got in trouble a lot, it took me being under house arrest for trafficking marijuana (I was innocent) for me to get my life back on track. Going to jail and that whole experience made me rethink everything, and I learned how to code so I wasn't so bored. That was in 2010. It wasn't until 2025 that this became my full time job, thanks to you ❤️

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  When I started building https://fedidb.com as a developer activitypub debug tool, I needed to get info about servers, and I noticed that thefederation.info was pretty slow and had a dated UI. So I built a crawler and started collecting stats. When I noticed that more people were checking stats, I spun out the dev tools to pubkit and made FediDB a fediverse database of stats. Now, many of those network stats sites have disappeared. But FediDB is still alive, and stronger than ever ✨

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  To the people who think I'm doing too much, spreading myself too thin or forgetting about Pixelfed: All of these projects were created to benefit or serve Pixelfed, Loops is separate for a reason, https://fedidb.com powers several aspects of Pixelfed, https://fediverse.info is an onboarding tool, https://respectfulplatforms.org is a charter of rights for the people. I believe in the social web, and spent years building platforms and services to help it thrive. Pixelfed is still my main fo...

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  Also, after the viral exposure of Pixelfed in January 2025, I got a dozen offers to sell, like 7 figures. That would be life changing money. I couldn't even entertain this though, I had a feeling some were proxies of Meta, that is nothing to them, the ability to shutdown another competitor. I never started this to sell out, I really believe in our mission, and how we can build safer and people centric alternatives. Pixelfed is proudly funded by people, like you! https://pixelfed.org/supp...

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  It did suck to see people accusing me of malicious intentions with Loops, that I would never publish the source code. So I made the difficult decision to take a year off from Pixelfed development to build Loops. The Pixelfed community did not like that, and were quite vocal about my promises for a better mobile app, bug fixes, better federation and account migration. So after FediCon 2026, I focused on Pixelfed. We shipped 14 releases since then 🚀 https://fedidb.com/software/pixelfed/versio...

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  In early 2025, people were upset that NLnet was funding Loops and the source code wasn't public yet*. So after attending FediCon in August of 2025, I came home and began writing the server for Loops, and a new mobile app, both shipped in October/November of 2025. In March 2026, Loops shipped Starter Kits and Mastodon took our implementation and built Featured Collections! https://blog.joinloops.org/introducing-starter-kits/ * - We didn't get paid until the source was public btw

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  Then, with the help of @shlee@aus.social, we launched the Pixelfed Kickstarter to fund the development of Pixelfed, Loops and Sup! We set the goal at $35,000 originally but increased that to $50,000 and it was reached in two days! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

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  Then, on Jan 21, 2025 I wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. That also went viral. https://pixelfed.social/p/dansup/787255857567136575

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  January 2025 was so crazy. I launched the Pixelfed apps in the App/Play Store, then Meta blocked Pixelfed urls and when I posted about it, it went viral and got tons of press. Pixelfed went viral on Bluesky, trending for days, and shot up on the App Store charts. Then I launched the Kickstarter. Pixelfed.social did stay up and went from 20k MAU to 300K MAU in one week, becoming the largest fedi server by MAU. I learned so much from that...

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  I can also write a thread of posts, or schedule a post on Mastodon with #hashtag and mention autocomplete and highlighting. https://columnly.social even supports markdown on some platforms 🔥 #Columnly

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  With https://columnly.social I can be logged into 4 mastodon.social accounts, 3 pixelfed.social accounts and 1 loops.video account At the same time, and switch between them with one tap 😎

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/117586194168536723 I created this in January 2025, right when Pixelfed was going viral, to establish a set of principles for social web platforms to adopt. We need to protect our people, and make it clear that we do not tolerate abuse, because so many platforms reversed their policies after Trump got re-elected.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@pixeldev/117586056803756565 Bundling the Help Center in each server was a mistake, having a central source with multiple language support, app deep links and more will allow us to serve users better and maintain a consistent support flow and design. Why? The app can evolve faster than the admin can update the server, so we can handle that properly in the app by fetching the help center json articles and displaying them in app, or on the web for the webUI. It also...

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  I uninstalled the Mastodon app, and have https://columnly.social added to my iPhone home screen with Push Notifications enabled. I could never get Icecubes push notifications working with my Mastodon account, but now they work with a web app 😎 #Columnly

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  I am pretty hopeful that my Laravel ActivityPub library NLnet grant application will get approved, I did make it to the second round! This would be my 7th grant, out of 8 applications, the first being in 2019 as the first fediverse project. I couldn't be more proud to have spread the word and now there are so many fediverse projects they have funded.

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  FediDB has evolved 🔥 Map: https://fedidb.com/map Feature Finder: https://fedidb.com/software/finder Software Comparison Tool: https://fedidb.com/software/compare AP Explorer: https://fedidb.com/tools/pub Datasets: https://fedidb.com/datasets The fediverse database is now a fediverse wiki, allowing anyone to help contribute information for each software and server! Spread the word. #FediDB

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  @doesnm Fixed, try now!

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  @doesnm Oh I see, I will look into this!

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  Another column mastodon client appears! https://ceramic.looechao.com/

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  FediDB now has its own status page! https://fedidb.opstatus.net

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/117576084419067065 This is legit my dream job, building awesome things that other people like. Thank you for making this possible ❤️

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  Pixelfed has 5 microservices that power the ecosystem (autospam, discovery, push, recovery, versions) Loops has 4 (beacon, push, relay, versions) Sup has 7 (tba) All 3 depend on FediDB APIs in some way There are a lot of details that users do not see, and may take for granted, but I legit thrive on overthinking, overplanning and building them Marketing, Design, DevRel, Community Support, Admin, Moderation, SysOps, Funding, Conferences, Docs, R&D I wear a lot of hats beside the coding o...

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  Just updated Loops Platform Services page to add our new status pages, and integrated uptime stats for each service. https://joinloops.org/platform-services #Loops

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  I still can't believe this happened, 2x funded in 48 hours. Still building 🚀 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

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  @ondrej@mastodon.rfc1925.org legend, on the web and IRL/afk ❤️

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  I know it can be pretty disheartening as a developer who spent years perfecting the craft and building a fediverse platform, only to see new vibe coded platforms emerge. But just remember that people can tell, and that vibe coders typically do not possess the knowledge or skills to scale their platform to hundreds, thousands or millions of users without writing a prompt to "fix bugs". Our human made platforms will continue to thrive, increasingly so, as people discover this. #madeBy...

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  I'm not even mad at all the people who criticized me for working on Loops and not Pixelfed. I feel bad for letting them down, but I promised our Kickstarter backers, and NLnet that I would build Loops as a federated and fully open source platform. So I did. Now I'm back to focusing on Pixelfed, we shipped 11 huge updates in 2 months, squashing bugs, delivering long awaited feature requests and making account migration work. Now it's your turn to tell me how I can improve Pixelfed...

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  I didn't realize how much time I spent being laser focused on building Loops, and now I'm finally catching up on everything else. Pixelfed, FediDB, Fediverse.info, Sup and a dozen related micro services and packages. someone needed to build columnly.social, a fediverse tiktok, curated network stats + community software lists, and a digital charter of rights (https://respectfulplatforms.org) because you all deserve better and safer third spaces ❤️ #catchingUp #socialWeb #strongerTogeth...