Pixelfed

What is Pixelfed?

Pixelfed is an open source, federated photo-sharing platform — a decentralized Instagram alternative built on the ActivityPub protocol. You post photos and short videos, follow people, and get a chronological feed with no ads, no third-party tracking, and no engagement-ranking algorithm. Each Pixelfed server (“instance”) federates with the wider fediverse, so accounts on different servers — and on Mastodon — can follow and interact with each other.

What is Pixelfed best for?

Photographers and everyday users who want an Instagram-style experience without the surveillance and algorithmic feed, and communities or operators who want to run their own photo network. Because it speaks ActivityPub, it fits people already on the fediverse who want a photo-first home that still connects to Mastodon and other federated apps.

What can Pixelfed do?

• Share photos and videos — up to 10 media files per post, with captions and alt text
• Chronological, algorithm-free timelines: home, local, and network feeds
• Stories and Collections for grouping and highlighting photos
• Per-post audience control: public, unlisted, or followers-only
• Federate over ActivityPub with Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse
• Hashtags, geotags, likes, comments, and bookmarks
• Official iOS and Android apps (launched January 2025), plus a responsive web UI
• Privacy and safety tools: two-factor authentication, no ads, no third-party analytics

Where does Pixelfed fall short?

• Smaller network than Instagram. The fediverse photo community is a fraction of Instagram’s size, so discovery and reach are more limited — you’re trading scale for control and privacy.
• Federation adds moderation nuance. Content and follows span independent servers, so your experience depends partly on which instance you join and how its admins moderate and defederate.
• Not a Discovery/Explore-style algorithm. By design there’s no recommendation engine surfacing content to you, so growing an audience relies on hashtags, follows, and cross-instance sharing rather than an algorithmic push.

Is Pixelfed free?

Yes — Pixelfed is fully free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tiers or feature gating. You can join a free public instance like pixelfed.social, or self-host your own and only pay for the server it runs on. There is no official paid cloud product.

What does Pixelfed replace?

Pixelfed is a self-hosted, open source alternative to Instagram for photo and short-video sharing, and it overlaps with photography-community platforms like Flickr and 500px. It gives you the post-and-follow social experience without ads, tracking, or a subscription — on infrastructure you control. If you instead want to manage and archive your own photo library rather than share socially, self-hosted tools like Immich or Lychee are the closer fit.

FAQ

Is Pixelfed open source? Yes. Pixelfed is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and the full source is on GitHub. It’s a genuine OSI-approved open source license, not source-available.

Can I self-host Pixelfed for free? Yes. The software is free; you only pay for hosting. Pixelfed is a Laravel (PHP) app, so you’ll run it with a database (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL) and Redis, with Docker configs provided.

Is Pixelfed a good Instagram alternative? For privacy and control, yes — a chronological feed, no ads, and no tracking. The main tradeoff is reach: the fediverse audience is much smaller than Instagram’s.

What do I need to run Pixelfed? A server that can run a PHP/Laravel app, a supported database (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL), Redis for queues and caching, and object or local storage for media. Official Docker and Docker Compose files are included.