10. Contacts

The beautiful things about Ente compared to other self hosted personal media applications is that it also offers you a social graph. That means you and friends and family of yours can also comment, like and share your albums and photos. It basically becomes a private social media where each albums is only shared with people you want it to be shared with or for who it is relevant. 

However, even though you can share an album publicly with people via public links the only official contacts you can have are ones that are on the same Ente instance as you. Hence, it is not federated nor a decentralized application. All is depended on a single instance. If your instance goes down then so do all of your photos and videos.

1. This also means that social graphs only work for people subscribed to the same instance
2. Hence, if you want to add a contact or want to share an album with a friend of yours they need to be subscribed to the same instance. 
3. This is radically different from standard  social graphs where everyone sits on the same instance e.g Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and others

Now, most likely at this moment the default Ente instance (owned by the Ente organization) holds the most amount of users. Therefore, Ente does run the risk of becoming a centralized application again if the network effect of being all on the same instance will win from self hosted instances. At this moment there is no roadmap plan for federation or anything decentralized of that matter. Hopefully, in the future we will see some progress in this department but for now the only way to share albums, comments and likes is only via public links or if your friend is on the same instance. 

How to add a contact 

Ente Photos doesn’t have a separate contacts list or a way to add contacts independently. A person becomes available as a contact only when you share an album with them, using their Ente account email address. So if you want to add Anna as a new contact then you will first share an Album with Anna or Anna shares an album with you. 

1. Go to your Album

2. Click on the share button on he top right corner 

3. Add viewer, collaborator or admin

4. Then enter the email address of Anna

5. Then go to your contact list where Anna will appear as a contact.

6. Then the final step is to associate the contact email address of Anna with the person Anna.

7. From now on you can see Anna's comments, likes and can easily share albums with her