~“Technically, this means that a Mastodon user M will think that he follows someone but will receive poorly formatted versions of most of the content.”~ — a rephrasing of some discourse going around today targeting a different platform.

A fundamental reality of the open social web is that not every app should be an "everything app" — it simply doesn't make sense like that.

I have an upcoming talk explaining what the current architecture of ActivityPub projects tends to be, and what alternative architectures are possible.

There's no reason you should only be limited to photos if you use Pixelfed, but Pixelfed doesn't need to provide microblogging capabilities, just like Mastodon doesn't need to provide good support for photos, long videos, articles, check-ins, music listens anything else that we can dream up.

This is just a byproduct of the current architecture of the Fediverse.