this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

Not even a surprise open sourcing...

Nvidia did it better :)

[–] [email protected] 122 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (11 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Pretty sure those are ai linked in bots that send that message to every single email they can scrape off the open web lmao.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

If that quote is what was sent to him to entice him to sell that sounds strongly like a scam

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pardon my ignorance, I am new to the fediverse and have no idea what I’m doing. But, when I signed up for loops on the website, I had to wait 3 days for them to send me a link to download a test-flight app for loops. I cannot recall if TestFlight is standard on iPhone or if I downloaded it previously.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Test flight is opt in if I remember correctly and allows you to download beta versions of apps. So I would assume you signed up or activated it or whatever for an app.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Appears to be in TestFlight

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago

Looks like skeleton code to me? I don't see how that could be what the site/app are running on

[–] [email protected] 164 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months 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] 20 points 2 months 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] 17 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (4 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] 36 points 2 months ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 months 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] 63 points 2 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months 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] 29 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months 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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I could give you like $20?

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I thought it already was open source

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago

the backend not the app

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