"Ali S. invited you to Lightfall
{{name}} thought you'd love it here. They're probably right. Lightfall is an independent photography community. Real photos, good people, no pressure to be anything other than your wonderful self."
'name' was to be stuffed (should have been Ali S?).
A better URL to post would have left of everything after ...photo.
Hey there, it's Nick, founder of Lightfall and I can confirm, lightfall.photo is real! Thanks so for the mention, Nikkorman!
Also thanks for flagging that issue with the invite page, that's been fixed up. We're a small team working hard to build the platform out and we love feedback.
nd987 wrote:
Hey there, it's Nick, founder of Lightfall and I can confirm, lightfall.photo is real! Thanks so for the mention, Nikkorman!
Also thanks for flagging that issue with the invite page, that's been fixed up. We're a small team working hard to build the platform out and we love feedback.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the site!
Nice site. But I can't find a page showing that there is a free membership and comparing the features of free vs pro, like what size of images can be posted, without signing up first.
@nd987 thank you and congrats! I am sure many people will enjoy this product. Unfortunately, this will not be me, for the same reason I cannot use Flickr. I prefer layouts where a photograph takes over 95% of the vertical real estate by default, without having to suffer the slideshow/fullscreen mode. You only allocate about half of visible page to a photo, the rest is wasted on the header, footer, and other distractions. But that's OK, one cannot please everybody!
pete478888 wrote:
Nice site. But I can't find a page showing that there is a free membership and comparing the features of free vs pro, like what size of images can be posted, without signing up first.
I have a biased and perhaps unfair opinion about photo sharing sites, informed by my own experience with SmugMug.
SmugMug started as very reasonable but over the years got progressively more expensive at each renewal, sometimes at multiples above the inflation rate.
The nature of these sites is that they become progressively more essential to you the longer you are member - you build up an ever-increasing portfolio of images, and you come to rely on the availability of this growing portfolio for more and more situations. For example, I came to rely heavily on SmugMug as the image server for nearly all of my public forum posts.
This growing reliance seems to be a "feature" of the business plans of these sites, thus their confidence they can keep increasing the price above reason while keeping high retention. For many, the switching cost is so great that even exorbitant price increases seem reasonable. Eventually the price SmugMug exceeded the cost of switching (and my laziness) and I finally stopped renewing my service.
Totally understand your concerns @snapsy - in fact, seeing the platforms I used to love become enshittified is one of the major reasons I built Lightfall. I set out to create the online photography space that I always wished existed, something more pure and just for the art of photography.
Lightfall has none of the "dark patterns" that other platforms have like manipulative algorithms (we have a simple Recommended sort that simply boosts good content, in addition to chronological sorting), it's not designed to keep you on the site endlessly, and it's completely bootstrapped with no outside investors, so we can design the platform for the best interest of users, not shareholders.
We're photographers ourselves and care deeply about our users and the user experience. Accounts are always free with all the core features (there's a weekly photo uploads cap but you get all the core functionality for free, always). We also offer a Pro level that removes the weekly limit and adds some features ... this helps us cover our costs and enables us to keep improving the platform.
We're still small but growing fast and I'm super excited about everything we have in the pipeline.