Yeah, it's not been easy to moderate, update, & use. If enough people are interested, I'm open to keeping it running as a closed instance. The biggest issue is that there isn't an out-of-the-box way for me to message all the local accounts to discuss this.
I hosted social.photo, which was a Pixelfed instance.
I had an uptick in users when I started to consider shutting down the site. It was the reason, ultimately, I decided to shut down as soon as possible. The software is awful, and I don’t want to deal with the issues multiplied by growth.
I decided to announce a shutdown by posting and hoping people see it because you can’t make an announcement to users on Pixelfed out of the box. I know there is an admin interface for it, but it doesn’t work.
Afterward, many of my new users told me they came from other instances that shut down.
This trend could be a blip as users create new accounts to migrate as they did before from their previous accounts. I know there is a user interface for this, but it doesn’t work.
Or it could be the terrible spam filter that blocks real users and allows bots. So, real users aren’t there to report bots. This is compounded by an uptick in new hype instances. These are sometimes poorly moderated instances full of bots awaiting returning interest from their owners to get cleaned up or closed.
I run a Pixelfed instance. The code is faaaaaaaarrrrr from polished. Its buggy and the admin interface either doesn't work or is poorly implemented. I'd rather run and moderate Lemmy than Pixelfed. I have considered just shutting it down several times. I run the instance https://social.photo/.
I doubt many are from other fediverse platforms. Pixelfed has been well known for a while. There are a lot of sharp edges running a Pixelfed server. He's stretched himself thin with all these projects. They need more love for sure.
This is to be expected. The same thing happened with Lemmy, several times. I had a bunch of signups on social.photo; however, the new people that signed up aren't very active. I think a lot of people were just trying it out and weren't impressed.
Yeah, I know. I'm not great at shooters, so I thought I could join and skill up with everyone else. I joined as soon as it was released. I was wrong; everyone was way better than me. I figured I'd try again later, but now I'm not so tempted. I might try it randomly one day when I get some extra time.
Discuss.online is pretty awesome. 🤓