Pixelfed
A decentralized, open-source photo sharing website and fediverse platform for posting images, following creators, and running independent social media instances.
What Pixelfed is
Pixelfed official site presents Pixelfed as a decentralized social media project focused on photo sharing. In practice, Pixelfed is both software that people can self-host and a set of public websites where users post images, follow accounts, discover creators, and interact across the fediverse.
Who uses Pixelfed
Pixelfed is used by photographers, artists, hobbyists, open-source communities, privacy-conscious social media users, and people who want an image-centered alternative to large centralized platforms. Some users join a public instance for convenience; others run a small instance for a club, community, publication, or personal portfolio.
How the website experience works
A Pixelfed instance gives users profiles, image posts, captions, comments, likes, follows, collections, and discovery surfaces. The important difference is that an instance is only one server in a wider network. A user on one Pixelfed server can often follow and interact with compatible accounts on other fediverse services, depending on each server's settings and moderation choices.
Relationship to the fediverse
Pixelfed is part of the ActivityPub-based fediverse, the same broad social web ecosystem associated with Mastodon and other federated services. That means Pixelfed is not a single central website in the same way as Instagram. The project website, the public pixelfed.social instance, and independent community instances all play different roles.
Open source and hosting
The Pixelfed software is open source and published under the AGPL license. Self-hosting gives an administrator control over updates, storage, moderation policies, federation settings, and community identity, but it also brings operational work such as backups, abuse handling, media storage, email delivery, and software maintenance.
Strengths and limits
Pixelfed's strengths are its photo-first interface, open-source code, federated model, and reduced dependence on centralized recommendation systems. Its limits include smaller network effects, uneven instance reliability, federation complexity, and the practical burden of moderating visual media across many independently run communities.
Why it matters
Photo sharing is one of the most familiar forms of social media, but the dominant services are usually centralized. Pixelfed matters because it tests whether a more portable, community-run, open-source model can support everyday image sharing without forcing every user into the same company-owned social graph.
WHOIS domain data
Data pulled: May 24, 2026View current WHOIS record
- Domain
- pixelfed.org
- IP address
- 104.21.76.155
- Registrar
- Cloudflare, Inc.
- WHOIS server
- whois.cloudflare.com
- Referral URL
- http://www.cloudflare.com
- Created
- April 15, 2018
- Updated
- June 2, 2022
- Expires
- April 15, 2029
- Nameservers
- josh.ns.cloudflare.com (172.64.33.126); lily.ns.cloudflare.com (108.162.192.130)
- Domain status
- clientTransferProhibited; clienttransferprohibited
- Contact privacy
- Registrant, admin, and technical contact details are redacted in the visible Who.is record.