If you want to share photos of your vacation, you’re likely to share them to Instagram. While the Meta-owned platform is the largest photo-sharing platform on the planet, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its competitors. One such competitor is called Pixelfed, and it’s the decentralized adversary of Instagram.
We’re seeing a bit of a mass exodus from Instagram to other platforms. Much like how scores of people continue to leave X (formerly Twitter) because of the platform’s downward spiral, people are leaving Instagram because of a couple of recent changes.
For starters, Meta is moving away from fact-checking and implemented a community notes feature. That was pretty negatively received. Along with that, the company revised the “Hate Content” policy and now allows hateful speech toward women and trans folks (because allowing more hate speech somehow makes a platform better…).
While a smaller company won’t really be able to scrape a substantial number of Instagram’s users away, it’s still not great for thousands of people to be leaving for another platform. We’ll just need to see how the company handles this.
Pixelfed is the newest Instagram competitor on the block
Saying that Pixelfed is new isn’t quite accurate. The platform will celebrate its seventh birthday this year. Starting in 2018, it’s been holding on to its own little slice of the social media pie. However, disgruntled “grammers” have been leaving Instagram and settling in Pixelfed recently. In fact, in a 24-hour span, Pixelfed gained 11,000 users. That number will rise as more people become aware of the platform.
The thing about Pixelfed is that it’s part of the “fediverse”, hence the name. It’s an open-source and decentralized photo-sharing platform that comes free of ads, unlike Instagram. This isn’t a dig at Instagram, as Meta is primarily an ad company. However, that won’t mean anything to the average Joe who hates ads.
Are you curious about trying it out?
When Pixelfed first launched, it was only a web client, but it’s now on mobile. The thing is that you will need to download third-party clients that host Pixelfed. You can check them out on the official Pixelfed downloads page. There are two options for Android and one option for iOS.
Since this is a decentralized platform, you’ll need to choose a server, or “Instance”, before you can get on. It’s similar to what you need to do when you sign up for Mastodon. Just expect a more involved sign-up process compared to Instagram. However, on the plus side, Pixelfed doesn’t scoop up and sell your data.
It’s hard to say if this platform will be able to chip away at some of Instagram’s users, but we’ll have to see.
