Meta seemed to block links to Pixel powereda decentralized photo sharing platform, on Facebook, according to the two users on Bluesky And 404 Media. A small group of posts related to “pixelfed.social” was removed, using Facebook’s “Spam Community Standards” as justification.
When asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson said the removal of the posts was a mistake and that they would be reinstated.
Pixelfed runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is part of the broader “fediverse” of decentralized publishing platforms. It works a lot like Instagram in its ability to let you share, like and comment on images, but because it’s on ActivityPub, your posts may appear in other apps or be ported to entirely different versions of sharing photos if you wish. Meta is slowly adopting parts of ActivityPub into Threads, making it possible to publish to Threads and Mastodon at the same time, for example.
The timing of these deletions is enough to arouse suspicion. Meta has just announced some pretty radical changes to the way 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 company’s loosening of standards now allows speech that would be defined as hateful under normal circumstances, based on what Wired was able to dig up.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine that users might consider switching to an alternative like Pixelfed in response, and the platform has done so. share saturday that it was “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.” It’s also not unreasonable to imagine that the new right-wing Meta could preemptively block its competitors, just as X did with links to Mastodon and Substack.
