Meta admits it has removed links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed

Meta seems to have blocked the links Pixelfeda decentralized photo sharing platform, on Facebook, according to the two users on Bluesky and 404 Average. Every post that linked to “pixelfed.social” was removed, with Facebook’s “Community Standards on Spam” used as a justification.

When asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson said the removal of the posts was a mistake and they would be reinstated.

Pixelfed runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is part of the wider “fediverse” of decentralized publishing platforms. It works a lot like Instagram in its ability to share, like and comment on images, but because it’s on ActivityPub, your posts may appear in other apps or be taken to completely different photo-sharing sites if you want Meta is slowly adopting parts of ActivityPub into Threads, allowing you to post to Threads and Mastodon at the same timefor example.

The timing of these removals is enough to make anyone suspicious. Meta just announced quite dramatic changes to how it plans to moderate speech on its platforms. The company decided to end its third-party fact-checking program and change its Hateful Conduct policy last week. The loosening of the company’s standards now allow speech that would be defined as hateful under any normal circumstances, based on what Wired he was able to dig.

It’s not unreasonable to imagine that users might consider jumping ship to an alternative like Pixelfed in response, and the platform did. share on Saturday which was “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social”. It is also not unreasonable to imagine that the new right-leaning Meta could preemptively block its competitors, as X did with links to Mastodon and Substack.