Pixelfed federates and supports remote follows

The Instagram alternative Pixelfed, which is part of the fediverse as this blog is, now supports following accounts from outside the Pixelfed instance. Much thanks to the developer for making this happen! This is a major milestone on its way to its first stable release.

I’ve successfully send a post from Mastodon (the Twitter alternative in the fediverse) and received it in my Pixelfed account. I’ve replied on the post in Pixelfed and this reply is then visible on Mastodon. That’s how federation works!

Some problems still exist, that they are working hard on to fix:

• You can’t follow people from other Pixelfed instances. This is of course a big bug that I’m sure will be fixed soon.
• You can’t follow accounts from all fediverse software yet. E.g. following someone from Pleroma (another Twitter alternative) doesn’t yet work

I’ve also tested remote follow with Friendica (the Facebook alternative), Peertube (the YouTube alternative) and this WordPress blog, but no luck yet.

The photos I used in the test posts are of actress Genevieve Buechner taken by www.instagram.com/djuansala.