In a sequence of events that could cause headaches for Meta, the decentralized alternative to Instagram is growing at a rapid pace. Pixelfed is a free and open source photo sharing website that was originally created in 2018 and for the past few years has been mostly available through web or through third-party applications. This week, however, Pixelfed announced introducing its own mobile apps for iOS and Android, signaling a major expansion of the site that already has some 330,000 users and a growing support base.
Pixelfed tried to portray itself as everything that Instagram is not. Unlike Meta’s site, Pixelfed is ad-free and offers users charter which respects their “fundamental rights” to “participate in online spaces that respect their privacy, dignity and well-being.” The charter promises limited but consensual data collection, transparent algorithms, and an unsupervised, zero-tracking experience on the web. “Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing is not an opportunity for VCs or others to ruin the vibe. I turned down VC funding and will not inject any form of advertising into the project,” Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault, recently wrote on Mastodon. “Pixelfed is for people, period.”
This respect for user autonomy may be why the app seems to be growing in popularity. Indeed, Pixelfed’s growth has exploded over the past week, with the platform announcing an influx of users periodically testing the small team’s current resources. “We are seeing unprecedented levels of traffic on pixelfed.social and are working to maintain the service and provide additional resources!” Mastodon site site wrote Sunday.
You could understand how this might make Meta more than a little concerned. Earlier this week, doubts arose when 404 Media reported that the tech giant was caught censoring and deleting links to Pixelfed on its sites. Meta used the violation of its spam policy as justification. However, when Engadget reached out for comment, Meta claimed that the deletion of the Pixelfed links was a “mistake” and that they will be reinstated later.
Gizmodo has reached out to Meta for comment.
The social media industry is in a state of flux like never before, and the competition between mainstream platforms and low-fi alternatives has reached new heights. While Mastodon and other Fediverse sites have has been around for yearsElon Musk’s takeover of Twitter pushed such alternative sites into the mainstream. Now, as users search for X alternatives on websites like Bluesky and Hive, it makes sense that web users may also be interested in looking for an alternative to Meta’s offering. As TikTok threatens to disappear forever, web users are even flocking to another Chinese app, RedNotealthough it might be wiser to migrate to Loops instead, another Fediverse alternative which Supernault launched last year.