this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 152 points 1 day ago (5 children)

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.

[–] blazeknave 13 points 17 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 17 hours ago

Yes, but nobody believes those buyout requests. They're clearly phishing attempts.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

He stirs a lot of shit on his Mastodon account and gets into spats with other fedi devs. Just the other day he got into a one-sided spat with the GtS dev because the GtS dev implemented a feature to randomise the number of active users, which led to goblin.technology topping pixelfed.social in the FediDB charts. He then accused them of doing this to undermine him specifically, of wanting to 'de-legitimize Pixelfeds growth', despite it being explicitly a privacy feature.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

My favourite part about this is that Pixelfed has been misreporting stats for years, and still is.

https://github.com/pixelfed-glitch/pixelfed/pull/21

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

lmaoooo thats so petty what

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 day ago

not just "off vibes", he posts a bunch of shit that people call him out on, and then deletes it

[–] ChicoSuave 71 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cris_Color 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 day ago

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