Meta admits to deleting links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed
Meta seemed to block links too Pixelfeda decentralized photo sharing platform on Facebook, both say Users on Bluesky And 404 media. A small group of posts with links to “pixelfed.social“ was deleted, citing Facebook’s “Community Standards on Spam” as justification.
When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson said removing the posts was a mistake and that they would be restored.
Pixelfed runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is part of the larger “Fediverse” of decentralized posting platforms. It works similarly to Instagram and allows you to share, like and comment on images. However, because it runs on ActivityPub, your posts can be viewed in other apps if you wish, or ported to entirely different versions of photo sharing. Meta gradually adopts parts of ActivityPub in Threads, allowing posting to Threads and Mastodon at the same timeFor example.
The timing of these deletions is enough to make anyone suspicious. Meta just announced it pretty dramatic changes about how it plans to moderate speeches on its platforms. The company decided last week to both end its third-party fact-checking program and change its hateful conduct policy. The company’s relaxed standards now allow speech that under normal circumstances would be considered hateful. based on what Wired was able to dig up.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine that users might switch to an alternative like Pixelfed in response, and the platform did share on Saturday that there was “unprecedented traffic on pixelfed.social.” It’s also not unreasonable to imagine that the new right-wing meta could preemptively block its competitors. just like X did with links to Mastodon and Substack.
