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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.
He open sourced the "code". If you actually look in detail, there's no actual working code.
He also disabled issues on GitHub, so there's no way to report bugs (and thus discuss his code).
While he could be getting offers, everything about it just feels like a scam.
Could you elaborate? I'm not a developer but the repo does appear to be populated. Someone in the Mastodon replies said he might have forgotten to push some commits, are y'all alluding to the same thing?
I don't have the requisite competency to see what you're saying so I'd love more info on what you mean and why you think that
The repo is just full of configuration files and no actual working code. The backend code does not exist. The guy in mastodon thinks that dan forgot to upload his code to the github repo.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
New to open source? Good ideas don't really die in open source. If loops.video or Pixelfed are good ideas, open source will just do its thing because no one owns the idea once it goes open source
Good ideas absolutely do die all the time even in open source. If the original dev doesn't want to play nice, it's actually pretty difficult to create a new fork that everyone will agree on. Hopefully these federated apps have enough inertia to prevent the userbase from splintering when the original devs move on.
Isn't the point of this thread that the code isn't actually open source - that the released code isn't anything substantial?
If that quote is what was sent to him to entice him to sell that sounds strongly like a scam
Not even a surprise open sourcing...
Nvidia did it better :)
Pretty sure those are ai linked in bots that send that message to every single email they can scrape off the open web lmao.
Yeah "open source"... The app doesn't even have the source code...
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.
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?
