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The so-called Fediverse has enjoyed great popularity not only since the debacle surrounding the planned takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. It includes the Twitter alternative Mastodon and the social medium for photo sharing Pixelfed, whose use we explain below. Pixelfed is largely modeled after its popular role model Instagram and is therefore easy to use. However, the developers emphasize that, unlike Instagram, privacy is a top priority, so the social medium does not transmit any data to third parties.
The key word Fediverse is made up of “federated” and “universe”. The former indicates that the associated networks are decentralized, meaning they are not provided by a single provider. Rather, the Fediverse services are open source programs that anyone can run on their own server. The Pixelfed installation on a server is called an instance. How to set up your own pixelfed instance is well documented, but it is much more complicated than using the network and is not necessary for that: there are enough pixelfed instances; this article is solely about the use of the service.
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The instances communicate with each other and form a network together, so they also display photo postings from other instances. The technology is similar to the principle of e-mail and RSS feeds. The servers do not mirror the data of the other instances, but retrieve it. The Canadian developer dansup founded the Pixelfed project. He is also the admin of pixelfed.social, the oldest and largest pixelfed instance with over 55,000 users. According to the fediverse.party website, there are also over 200 other instances. The second largest is its German counterpart pixelfed.de with more than 10,000 users. There are also a few other instances from other countries and in other languages.
