I’m using the android app and I’ve found it decent. I think the UI/UX could use some quality of life improvements but it’s a simple and straightforward app to use.

I’m not on the main pixelfed.social instance but mine went down for a bit this morning. I just waited a bit and then I was able to login again.

Mastodon and Lemmy also had a lot of trouble even they experienced these huge waves of migrations partly because no one had scaled the software this far before

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.

I don’t do Instagram either but PixelFed has pretty chill vibes. I followed some hashtags like #cat and #nature and now I have a nice little feed of cats and nature.