Is anyone using PixelFed? How is your experience so far?

Yes, I have a user on pixelfed.social. I like it, and use it daily.
It is kind of like Instagram, but in the fediverse and is open source.
A cool feature Pixelfed has is the ability to follow hashtags, so your home feed will be a mix between posts from the users you follow and the hashtags you follow.

I have posted some pictures I've taken from hikes, and check in now and then when I feel like posting something or looking at pictures.

My experience is very different from what other people here seem to report. I am just posting into the void, I have posted 11 pictures to date, and I never linked the account to anything or told anyone about it. Still I have more than 50 followers, only from people who stumbled over my content and decided to follow. I'm only following half of that number, so it's not a politeness thing.

I've also gotten a few comments, though mostly people just click like and/or boost. It seems every time I post something I gain at least a follower or two.

So overall I'm pretty impressed by PixlFed. If you have something to share it's a good platform to do so. And there's nice landscape photography on there, at least.

I use it fairly frequently and enjoy it! My instance is Pxlmo but it hardly matters, federation doing its thing and all. The official app is quite buggy atm, but not unusably so, and it's fun to watch the updates slowly improve things. I do follow a lot of people who are actually on mastodon but only ones who mostly post pictures anyway, so they fit better in my pixelfed feed.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention! I also kinda use it as image hosting for other apps! Only for pictures worth posting though, not trying to clutter it up. All my picture posts on Lemmy are stored there. If you put the direct link to the pic in the Lemmy image field, it shows up just as if you'd uploaded it directly to the post, no click-through necessary.

I used to be into Instagram for the photography communities, now I'm exclusively using Pixelfed.

It's obviously not as good, and there isn't as much account variety, but it's getting there!

Pixelfed is awesome. Like a lot of Fediverse things you have to follow just about every hashtag to get enough content. I love particularly all the human made art, although I also follow a lot of AI art. Compared to other social media it is oddly peaceful and calm, no ads, no algorithm forcing engagement means you can safely go down some obscure rabbit holes and keep your peace of mind. Fediration itself between softwares is a work in progress, Lemmy/Mastadon/Pixelfed often does not work and even migrating all your follows from one instance to another isn't user friendly too. Considering that all this was done without billions of corporate dollars and with volunteers doing all the work, its a nice place to visit.

Instagram for geeks. My geeky followers follow me there, the normal people are still on Instagram where I post the same.

It’s a ghost town (much like this comment thread). ;)

Being an early adopter can be boring sometimes.

I use it a little bit. I think it's pretty good but I don't come from Instagram or anything like that, so I had no expectations. And I only use it very sparsely. I'm guessing that if you're a heavy browser you might run out of content. But for me personally such platforms are more for posting photos than endless browsing.

I'm not the biggest fan of the UI of the official app, but it's not bad bad.

It’s a cool concept with a lot of potential, but currently very buggy and incomplete. For example, basic functionality like hash tags need to be fixed and federated for it to be usable IMHO. It has piqued my interest, though, so I might sign up someday if the usability issues are ever addressed.

I haven't figured out how to find good photographers to follow but my last two posts there has both gotten over 25 likes which is more than I used to get on Instagram so I guess that's something. My only complaint is how much they scale down my pictures and absolutely butcher the quality.

The official app appears to be written in React Native and is as laggy and janky as you’d expect. Other than that, more people are using it (and/or interacting with it from elsewhere in the fediverse).

I do have an account (and PixelDroid installed on my phone), but most of the accounts I'd follow there I've already got added to my Mastodon, so I don't check it that often.

Sign up on mobile was absolute trash, completely buggered and I had to sign up over the web in the end (which then told me my username was taken FFS). A big put off.

Love what the dev is doing, but he needs to get the basics right before plowing ahead with features.

I like it but I wish I can migrate my account. When I moved to a friend's instance I had to manually upload all the photos and descriptions . I wish it was like peertube where I could just sync .

I used to use but no more because there are few users

tried it for a bit. not much going on there. got bored & quit

Can someone less lazy than me explain how it's functionally different from sharing images on e.g. mastodon?

You mean the thing for hosting galleries because Lemmy can't do that yet and Imgur won't work on Mobile without an app? Yes.

As a social network? No, and even when I tried it wouldn't let me switch my post's visibility from unlisted to public, so I shrugged and used it as an image host as I'd originally intended.

Not a big fan of the name. Even PixelFeed would make more sense.

What IS PixelFed?

Yes I'm on it, and don't post much, I guess to dip my toe to check it out but while I take photos for myself I don't look at the photos of others. I was never on IG at all so ...