A Crowdsourced Photo Gallery from the Fediverse – the Open Social Web in action

Here are some nice photos from around the fediverse: https://home.scoobysnack.net/gallery/. That page updates automatically as new photos are posted.

How did they get there? Well…

People from all over Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy and more posted photos into these communities:

https://piefed.social/c/photography

https://lemmy.world/c/photography

https://lemmy.world/c/japanpics

… and a few others. Moderators curate those communities to filter out anything obnoxious and people upvote the best ones.

Jerry used his PieFed account to create a “Feed” of 6 photography communities at feddit.online/f/photos. In PieFed a Feed is a bundle of communities with all their content shown together in a list. Those communities can be on any Lemmy, PieFed or Mbin instance. In the sidebar you can see all the communities in the Feed. That feed can be Followed, just like an account on Mastodon can be.

Someone on piefed.social followed ~photos@feddit.online (the ~ distinguishes it from a person, which uses @ at the start) which created this: https://piefed.social/f/photos@feddit.online. (Following a feed automatically subscribes one to all the communities within and if Jerry adds a new community to the feed all the subscribers auto-follow the new community. But I digress).

The author of home.scoobysnack.net looked up PieFed’s API spec and wrote some JavaScript which uses PieFed’s API to retrieve all the photos in the feed on piefed.social:

GET https://piefed.social/api/alpha/post/list?feed_id=47&limit=40&page=1&nsfw=Exclude&minimum_upvotes=0

… and finally their JavaScript displays the images.

So the journey these photos took went through 6 steps:

Mastodon / PixelFed / author -> Lemmy / PieFed / Mbin communities -> Feddit.online feed -> PieFed.social feed -> PieFed.social API -> home.scoobysnack.net

I think that’s pretty cool.

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If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://join.piefed.social/?p=2240 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)

RE: join.piefed.social/2026/01/24/

This use case shows why activtypub based "feeds" standardization is so imporant and can open up content like this. doing great work on that front and look forward to feeds being more standardized across fediverse apps.

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