For a limited period of time, sharing the alternative to Instagram was considered "spam."
According to users on Bluesky and 404 Media, Meta appeared to be restricting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized photo-sharing site, on Facebook. Pixelfed is a platform that allows users to share photos. Using Facebook's "Community Standards on spam" as a justification, a small set of postings that linked to "pixelfed.social" were removed from the platform.
A representative from Meta responded to a request for comment by stating that the removal of the posts was an error and that they will be reinstated.
A member of the larger "fediverse" of decentralized posting platforms, Pixelfed is powered by the ActivityPub protocol and operates as a part of the platform. When it comes to the capacity to share, like, and comment on photographs, it performs quite similarly to Instagram. However, due to the fact that it is hosted on ActivityPub, your postings may appear in other applications or be ported to completely alternative approaches to photo sharing if you so desire. In the process of gradually incorporating aspects of ActivityPub into Threads, Meta is making it feasible to post to both Threads and Mastodon at the same time, for instance.
The timing of these deletions is sufficient to raise suspicions in the minds of almost anyone. In a recent announcement, Meta made some significant adjustments to the way it intends to control speech on its many platforms. During the past week, the corporation made the decision to amend its policy against hateful conduct and to terminate its third-party fact checking program. According to the information that Wired was able to unearth, the company's rules are currently being loosened, which means that communication that would be considered hateful under any normal circumstance is now permitted.
The platform did share on Saturday that it was "seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social." It is not unrealistic to suppose that people could contemplate switching to an alternate application such as Pixelfed as a response to this. It is therefore not implausible to suppose that the new Meta, which has a tendency toward the right, would block its competitors in advance, much as X did with links to Mastodon and Substack.
