I’ve been a PixelFed user for a few years now after having binned off Instagram a long time ago, but I’ve always kept an eye on Vernissage’s development. Pixelfed has had very little in the way of updates in several months despite having the far larger user base, whereas Vernissage has been steadily releasing updates for its comparatively tiny set of users, and not long ago released an iOS app which I thought I’d try out, which turned out to be superb - it’s so much better looking and performant than the official Pixelfed app. The downside for most (I imagine) would be the lack of an Android app.
Whereas Pixelfed is geared towards being an Instagram replacement, Vernissage seems to be tailored more to the Flickr/500px proper-photographer type crowd. While I was in the market for an Instagram replacement, Vernissage is the platform I’ve found myself increasingly using simply because of how well presented it is.
I was wondering if anyone else who is interested in photo sharing has tried both, and what their opinions are of them. There’s tons of chatter on Mastodon around Pixelfed, but a lot less about Vernissage.
Links to the main instances:
I’ll be interested in following this thread. Some customers of mine are tired of Pixelfed thousand little papercuts and are considering dropping entirely. Even one photographer preferred to run their own Mastodon instance to avoid dealing with Pixelfed’s eternal beta status. I might spend some time this weekend figuring out how difficult it would to deploy Vernissage.
I think Vernissage even added a migration option from Pixelfed lately.
I am also interested in some feedback on hosting it. I tried hosting Pixelfed a while ago, and while I got it to run, it was honestly quite annoying with lots of papercuts, so I retired it again shortly after.
I’ve never heard someone use the word papercuts that way.
I think it was a reframing of “death by a thousand papercuts”
Because it is missing an “and”?
Last time I looked at vernisage, they had signups closed and I couldn’t find out much about it. I had forgotten it existed until I saw your post, and honestly, it sounds way more relevant to me that pixelfed. It even does HDR out of the box!
Yeah, I had the same experience, then saw more and more photos on my feed coming from vernissage.photos and had another look. Yeah the HDR feature and EXIF info is great.
Can you download your photos from vernissage ?
You can export all your data including photos you post, but not sure about individually.
Can anyone compare the privacy policies of both services from a legal standpoint?
I love the idea of Pixelfed and briefly checked it out a couple years ago, bounced off it b/c hash tags weren’t federated, and other issues that I don’t remember the specifics of. For example, when I click on #cats in a photo caption, I want it to show me photos across all instances w/ that hash tag, like the “All” feed in Lemmy.
I don’t wanna poo poo on something that is essentially a free service for plebs like myself, but I remember things being just broken/ incomplete enough and it seemed like its original creator had already moved on to other projects that I filed it under “things w/ potential that aren’t quite there yet (and may never get there).”
Yeah, don’t get me started on that. The developer of Pixelfed is extremely easily distracted. Every time a promise is made to focus on the Pixelfed improvements or bug fixes, the following day he’s working on something else. I feel guilty for complaining, because it’s free and he’s essentially a solo dev, but when users are being told one thing and they see something else, you tend to lose confidence. He’s done amazing work, but there’s a lot to iron out that hasn’t seemed like a priority for a long time.
