That’s funny because it’s not difficult at all to build an app like this. The value in buying such a business would be the scale of its user base, which is likely only several thousand at this point. And, if it were sold, most people would leave since most of those users are just dipping a toe in at this point to see what the app is like. Frankly, the content sucks. People are using this app out of goodwill and an interest in helping to build an alternative to the corpo apps. If dansup sells or does not open source, then that goodwill evaporates.
The value of loops right now is the attention it is getting. Buyers are trying to swoop in early and bet that they can capitalize on the growth to get more money from other investors.
VC are gambling money as always
Building an app like this for 100 people, sure. Making something handle smooth, affordable video delivery at scale. That’s a spicy meatball.
The front-end is a mess for testing but doable. Then if you do live, you’ve got proxies and stream copies.
I host stuff at great scale, it’s a different beast.
Agreed. I am downloading and occasionally checking out some of the content on all of these apps like Loops or Pixelfed because I’d like to see them succeed. I’m not a content generator, but I hope having accounts on and viewing these services helps somewhat.
E:typo
I’m not a content creator, but I recently went on vacation and put my best stuff up.
Without the algo, everything just gets lost to time. When I put a few things up, they faired well, but once they were out of the front seat, ( a day or so ) they were never seen again.
Where I post a couple nice things on bluesky, I get reverberations for days.
This seems to be the main issues with his apps. Visibility is scarce beyond the original post, wherein even with followers the chances of someone seeing your post beyond that honeymoon phase dwindles.
The only exception are users with lots of followers. From what I’ve seen in my brief time using Pixelfed for example, it’s usually accounts with at least a few hundred followers that see a highet retention of visibility.
You cant do more than dip a toe in, as there is no more functionality and even that is buggy and incomplete.
Yeah this guy toying with selling is pretty insulting to anyone trying to help him out.
Dan is constantly talking about buyout requests he’s receiving for Loops and Pixelfed, so much so that it makes me a bit suspicious of those claims. Nearly every other post I see from his Mastodon feed is bragging about another alleged buyout offer, and how he’s not for sale.
Has he ever shown proof of any of these offers he’s received? It’s not that I want to doubt him, but he’s been very persistent with this claim and I think it’s fair to scrutinize it at this point.
It is a time of predatory billionaires grabbing all forms of media. It would not surprise me if he did get offers. It would also be very unprofessional to broadcast the valuation of Loops and Pixelfed while turning down the offer. It would be like recording and showing someone asking for a date and getting rejected.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Pixelfed got mainstream notice, and there’s always someone willing to give you money. Pretty much every popular Firefox/Chrome addon developer gets emails about buying it, but those are usually just shady companies looking to push malware onto the existing install base.
Even apart from those, it wouldn’t really surprise me to see some VC interest when Pixelfed hit #1 on the play store. They love the idea of glomming onto something that looks like a rocket and trying to ride it to the moon
it might be useless gossip but for some reason a lot of fedi has various problems with this guy. for various reasons… he just has like … off vibes?
i guess similar to how lemmy devs are marxist lenninists—at least making it open source means projects can be forked if the founders go off the deep end.
not just “off vibes”, he posts a bunch of shit that people call him out on, and then deletes it
He stirs a lot of shit on his Mastodon account and gets into spats with other fedi devs. Just the other day he got into a one-sided spat with the GtS dev because the GtS dev implemented a feature to randomise the number of active users, which led to goblin.technology topping pixelfed.social in the FediDB charts. He then accused them of doing this to undermine him specifically, of wanting to ‘de-legitimize Pixelfeds growth’, despite it being explicitly a privacy feature.
My favourite part about this is that Pixelfed has been misreporting stats for years.
lmaoooo thats so petty what
Nah. If you’ve ever run a mildly popular website, you’d know that you get spammed with ads for seo, content marketing, and buyout requests.
Yes, but nobody believes those buyout requests. They’re clearly phishing attempts.
It makes me question my Kickstarter donation along with his other controversy. Having said that, maybe we need some of that attitude on our side. The incumbent platforms’ charters are to end competitive platforms. Some sass can help us perhaps.
Where’s the code? There’s only 9 commits to the backend and its only scaffold code. There’s not even activitypub?
Same with the app. Was this just a publicity stunt?
The Loops app certainly feels like it. Not to diminish a solo dev doing something on his own, but it just seems like a standard video player with like, comment, follow. Search feature is only by user; when you type a comment, it doesn’t wrap the text, it just moves horizontally until you post it. I think the feed is literally just a chronological list of every video posted, and for some reason, most of the videos I see on it are just like…atmospheric videos. Still camera, nature background, rain in someone’s backyard. People love the concept, but I don’t see how it’s anywhere near ready to compete for users like other options are right now.
The web UI has been teased for so long, too. I’m losing trust with dan. I mean im glad he found success with pixelfed, and i wouldn’t even have a problem with how long it takes loops; but he’s just dishonest. If he was more honest, transparent and open sourced the code early on i would’ve had no problem. But this? what is this?
I’m not a big Fediverse proponent, like…the concept is good, if not still a little young (activity pub isn’t ironed out across mediums and is still a bit jank in my opinion) but it seems a bit like a cash grab to be the savior dev making all the X-equivalent of Fediverse, and just hopefully something sticks. With PixelFed blowing up, feel like Loops is gonna take a back seat for quite a while.
Remember it’s a solo dev still. I guess a nice weekend project would be to create a new material3 app for it :)
Of course, my problem is just that he isn’t being transparent, and is dishonest. If he actually made the code open source, and did not get himself into controversy all time i wouldn’t mind him being a solo dev :)
A few days ago he posted (then I think deleted) this, which among other things makes me extremely inclined to not believe anything he says:
In March 2019 I teased the Pixelfed mobile app. The only problem was, I didn’t know how to write one. So just like the original “federated instagram” post, I faked a commercial to build hype. It was coming along well. Then in mid 2020, I came out and put the app aside. It wasn’t until late 2022 that I found a Pixelfed react native app, and cloned it and tinkered. In 2023 I released the first Pixelfed app, but it was slow. I rewrote it from scratch in May 2024. From faking, to making!
wtf? Thanks for sharing this, i didn’t know.
You’re welcome to grab the code and make something better.
the code he published is unusable…
Not even as a jumping off point? I’d have to get into it on my computer but it certainly looks like at least a partial build has been posted from poking around with my phone. Loops isn’t terribly complex.
not the backend, just boilerplate mostly
Yeah, I wonder if he’s just taking his time or he’s trying to keep some stuff as closed? I’ll admit it’s been about a year since I even looked at code but I feel it, calling me to abandon all life except the glowing screen again.
My fear with pixelfed and loops is the single dev seemingly more interested in money and clout than in building something long lasting for the community. I don’t expect it to last long, but my friends really crave an app to exchange reels in and so we’re hoping loops will be sufficient until something more stable comes around.
Yeah, this one guy has been trying to jumpstart so many projects. And that’s admirable, but it’s also too much for one dude (and I know he’s tried to get some other people, but there has been drama around that - by him, I think).
But more to your point - something feels a little off even though I can’t confirm anything. It does feel like this guy might just take some money and run if given the chance.
And I don’t necessarily blame him for that - I probably would too. I don’t want to work, and if I had money I wouldn’t.
But there’s just this feeling I can’t shake about all of it. And I have a Pixelfed and a Loops account. They are both fine, so we’ll see, I guess. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I end back up with Mastodon being my sole social place for sharing photos, for example.
I thought it already was open source
It wasn’t. He had previously said that he would open source it after it had become more stable, but there was a lot of skepticism that he would follow through.
what an asshole
For following through?
the backend not the app
Looks like skeleton code to me? I don’t see how that could be what the site/app are running on
Yeah “open source”… The app doesn’t even have the source code…
Not even a surprise open sourcing…
Nvidia did it better :)
If that quote is what was sent to him to entice him to sell that sounds strongly like a scam
Pretty sure those are ai linked in bots that send that message to every single email they can scrape off the open web lmao.
did he at least get a dollar value first?
edit: I honestly would have pursued it as far as legally possible first just to know how much of a fuck you I was sending … can someone offer to buy Bluesky now?
I could give you like $20?
Thank you for your generous offer, AdamEatsAss
You should haggle a bit mate. I think a few things are on the table here.
Fine, tree fiddy AND an ass eating. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Would it be more or less if Adam wasn’t eating your ass?
Less
Now he can tell the next guy that $20k isnt enough, because he was already offered it by AdamEatsAss last year
Can’t wait to see AdamEatsAss’s changes to bluesky, he will take the company down the right path
AdamEatsAss is a man of the people. He’s got his finger on the pulse of popular opinion.
He is the defender of democracy in free speech. Without him we’d be astray
deleted by creator
Is there no iPhone app?
Pardon my ignorance, I am new to the fediverse and have no idea what I’m doing. But, when I signed up for loops on the website, I had to wait 3 days for them to send me a link to download a test-flight app for loops. I cannot recall if TestFlight is standard on iPhone or if I downloaded it previously.
Test flight is opt in if I remember correctly and allows you to download beta versions of apps. So I would assume you signed up or activated it or whatever for an app.
Yeah this is just vaporware at this point.
Sweet… this is the first time I’ve ever actually used vaporware. Typically I never get a chance, but it’s impressive that Dan was able to release vaporware.
Vaporware can also include prototype spaghetti code releases.
Nice, and now we’re just changing definitions of words to match what we think they should mean. That’s so woke.
Is DEI also vaporware?
This app is currently available and works. Not sure what your problem is.
Did you try to actually add content? I did. 5 videos on the android app, as the webui has no option to upload or even edit already uploaded video. My experience is that loops is a garbeled mess without any taught or plan, that recurringly crashes or enter endless loading screens.
I use it several times a day and have uploaded several videos since early January. I’m using the android app exclusively and there have been a couple of times that I went to use it and it wasn’t working, but mostly it works great.
The web ui has no option to even view the feed, as far as I can tell. Only individual videos and the settings.
Lol
Wtf. That pixelfed asshole was writing this shit as closed source before?
He was working on it but it wasn’t completed until now. I’m unsure why it wasn’t open sourced from the start but either way, it’s open sourced now.
Not sure you can trust him at this point.
Worse case scenario he gathers telemetry and sells your information or gives it to a company that does. Either way, it’s gpl so we can clone it and host it ourselves.
Nah. He could sabotage documentation efforts. Loads of orgs use Foss licenses and aren’t trustworthy
Yeah man what an arsehole giving away free things, spending time making free things for everyone to use for free.
If he wants to keep his code private until he’s ready to release it - that’s somewhat up to him. The repo is a step in the right direction, just give it some time.
Looking through the git repo the ignore is lopping off quite a number of files too (server) however I’m not sure how much of those are things like secrets, cache, other scripts and so forth.
Well, it’s kind of up to him. His NLNet grants require it to be open source and dictate what license he uses, but I don’t know the details to know if that just means it has to be open sourced in order to receive the grant (awarded upon completion not ahead of time) or right away.
Does the grant apply to just pixelfed, or loops as well?
He has gotten at least three grants in the past that I saw on the NLNet website for Pixelfed, but none were listed as active when I looked. However, since you have to complete your project to get paid out I didn’t see a way to know if he actually received any or all of those grants. The current active grant is just for Loops. I believe the old Pixelfed grants also required certain licensing and the project being open source though.
Also, as of this morning, he was posting about how in order to make Loops open source and federated he needs to hit $200k on his Kickstarter. However, he was previously challenging people who were claiming it’s not currently federated or open sourced. So now the story is that it’s not yet and he needs more money to make that happen when previously he was claiming it already was both of those things.
It’s…a mess for sure.
Oh, and he just banned hazel again on loops. https://social.besties.house/@h/113966323700310342
