Hi everyone.

Something that many of us enjoy doing is sharing images that we have created, often screenshots, related to our interests. For a quick share-and-forget we have sites like imgur, but as of yet we have no central place of sharing and collating nixers-related images. This would make it easy to organise, share and discuss images in a form that preserves the images and discussions.

This post is to gauge interest in having such a site e.g. on a subdomain.

Currently what I am thinking is a pixelfed instance. For those that aren't familiar with pixelfed, it is best described as a FOSS instagram clone, but it can also federate with other pixelfed instances (and I believe even some other servers like mastodon, so mastodon users can follow pixelfed accounts. However, federation can be disabled if wanted). What is nice about pixelfed is that you have an "instance timeline", which in our case would be all nixers' image posts. I think in terms of content matter it would mirror the forum, so off-topic images would still be welcome if you'd like.

So what do you guys think? Do you think such a platform would improve our experience here?

I like this idea. One thing I'm kinda torn on is using it just for image hosting vs image hosting + discussion -- b/c you could just as well have a sub board here for sharing EG screenshots where the discussion happens, even i fthe image is hosted on a nixers owned pixelfed instance.

The main benefit I see to having discussion take place on pixelfed vs the forum is decentralized subscription to nixers from other services

I suppose the advantage this would provide would be an easily-accessible central point for all of a given user's images and their related discussions. Rather than scanning through a thread to find an image amongst many, with discussion mixed in, you could bounce between users checking out their screenshots, and looking at the discussion for only the images that catch your eye the most. It would essentially serve as the page you have on your website at https://notes.neeasade.net/rice.html, except with comment support and users don't need their own website.

btw - just seen your landing page and god damn i wish i had thought of it, it is beautiful

(05-09-2020, 08:23 AM)mcol Wrote: It would essentially serve as the page you have on your website at https://notes.neeasade.net/rice.html, except with comment support and users don't need their own website.

I think most of us have such webpage on our site, so maybe the main usage of this would be to have them all in one place.

I'm not convinced much discussion will happen on it though, but it could be very fun to have it for display.

(05-09-2020, 08:23 AM)mcol Wrote: I suppose the advantage this would provide would be an easily-accessible central point for all of a given user's images and their related discussions.

right -- my point is you could have a thread where you post an image now for centralized discussion of a screenshot (and then if we move to that as a culture, just have a forum section for it, rather than a single dtop thread) -- the issue right now is nixers doesn't have a way to host the assets/images, just links to images, so it might be nice so have them archived here.

I imagine allowing assets to be hosted directly on the forums by members may come with some maintenance/spam management implications as well

> it is beautiful

thanks!

Quote:I think most of us have such webpage on our site, so maybe the main usage of this would be to have them all in one place.

Yeah that's pretty much all it would be. Those pages, for everyone, with comment sections.

Quote:my point is you could have a thread where you post an image now for centralized discussion of a screenshot (and then if we move to that as a culture, just have a forum section for it, rather than a single dtop thread)

This could be simple to do, that is true. An advantage pixelfed would have over this approach is that if someone decides "Oh I like neeasade's screenshots" then they can click on your profile and go to your pixelfed images and see them all together. I also think that subjectively posted a forum thread feels like a "bigger deal" than just an image on an image-sharing platform, but that could just be me.

> An advantage pixelfed would have over this approach is that if someone decides "Oh I like neeasade's screenshots" then they can click on your profile and go to your pixelfed images

just wanted to mention I think this is a really good pro for pixelfed or something like it

I personally don't have interest in such a thing, and think this would just split our (not so big) community over multiple platforms. Some discussions might happen on the image board, some here, and we'll either link them together manually or recreate posts here as "hey, so this cool thread happened on pixelfed, what do you think ?".

And to be fair, I don't see much screenshot posted here either. Maybe people could simply put a link to their feed in their signature/profile page ?

(08-09-2020, 04:22 AM)z3bra Wrote: And to be fair, I don't see much screenshot posted here either. Maybe people could simply put a link to their feed in their signature/profile page ?

I agree on this point. I mainly saw the pixelfed not as a discussion platform but as a centralize way to host our screenshots galleries instead of each having them on our own websites.
A middle-way solution would be to create a page that would link to other people's screenshot galleries, which is an interesting idea in itself — a wormhole of screenshots.

From the above discussion, it seems that the main issue is that we don't have a central place to upload images to share on the forums. Maybe we should address this point instead ?

(08-09-2020, 04:22 AM)z3bra Wrote: I personally don't have interest in such a thing, and think this would just split our (not so big) community over multiple platforms. Some discussions might happen on the image board, some here, and we'll either link them together manually or recreate posts here as "hey, so this cool thread happened on pixelfed, what do you think ?".

Yeah, this is a fair point. Although,

(08-09-2020, 04:22 AM)z3bra Wrote: I don't see much screenshot posted here either.

maybe there is a reason for this?

(08-09-2020, 04:22 AM)z3bra Wrote: Maybe people could simply put a link to their feed in their signature/profile page ?

(08-09-2020, 04:36 AM)venam Wrote: A middle-way solution would be to create a page that would link to other people's screenshot galleries, which is an interesting idea in itself — a wormhole of screenshots.

I really like the these ideas. A pro for pixelfed is that one does not need their own website to display images, but a counter-pro of using personal websites is that it encourages people to make their own personal websites :) so we could have a page here that contains links to people's own pages, and of course people already do have a link in their profile to their website.

So what about discussion, with this approach? If I like a specific image on somebody's website, I could message them on IRC (some people), or I could link it in a forum thread and hope they see it.

(08-09-2020, 08:26 AM)mcol Wrote: I really like the these ideas. A pro for pixelfed is that one does not need their own website to display images, but a counter-pro of using personal websites is that it encourages people to make their own personal websites :) so we could have a page here that contains links to people's own pages, and of course people already do have a link in their profile to their website.

Let me propose this, if the goal is to have a gateway to the community's screenshots and image directories:
We can create a git repo in the nixers projects, and have a public_html in it where everyone in the group has access to it. Then I would set a cron job to pull changes every hour and push them live on a specific nixers.net subdomain.

Would this public_html be a list of links?

(08-09-2020, 10:23 AM)mcol Wrote: Would this public_html be a list of links?

It could be a list of links, with a preview maybe, we can leave it open for edits. If everyone can commit to the repo, I'm sure it could look good, or at least "special".

Another option would be a list of links to pages on our personal websites that contain images, and we add tags to the images on our websites, and use a script to scrape images with those tags and create a page on nixers with the output.

Something like this, perhaps: https://github.com/m-col/temprepo

Main stuff in process.py

(09-09-2020, 05:31 PM)mcol Wrote: Main stuff in process.py

It looks good, maybe we can start with that.

NB: here it's probably better to use the <picture> tag with a compressed image in multiple format with lazy loading, while linking to the original pic in another directory. The loading time is always a bother when opening a large screenshots gallery. I'll try to cook something that easily converts the images in nice formats and sizes.

I've created the file where we can list our galleries here, I'll give you access to the repo so that you can modify the README and also we can fork/restart the scraping script under nixers-projects.

Sure, the templates are just skeletons which we should format into whatever web design we want (and I think many people here have better design skills than me!).

Could you add to one (or all) of your the images on your scrot page? We can use that (or an alternative) to identity screenshots that want scraping.