Pixelfed embodies what Instagram ought to be: a photography-focused social media app free from ads, algorithms, and invasive tracking. It’s decentralised and built on the ActivityPub protocol, allowing anyone to install it on their own server (much like hosting a website) while maintaining complete ownership of their account and data.
But perhaps they don’t know how to set up servers, or maybe they just don’t want to. People are used to the convenience of corporate social media’s login’n’play approach. It is one of modern life’s Faustian dilemmas: you open a website or app to fulfil a basic human instinct, to socialise. The only cost is your soul, your principles, your integrity, or whatever you call it when you alienate yourself by giving your time and data to the wealthiest individuals on the planet.
Pardon the (slightly) demagogic rant. What I’m getting at is that if you don’t want to be “owned”, someone needs to cover the cost of running the server. It’s not prohibitively expensive (I pay $5/month for my self-hosted Pixelfed account), but if self-hosting isn’t for you, there are many generous individuals who offer space on their servers.
One such option is Pixelfed’s main server, pixelfed.social, which currently hosts 146,000 active users and 46 million posts. This server is managed by Pixelfed’s creator, Daniel Supernault. At the end of January, he explained on Mastodon that this server and other he hosts cost around $4,000 per month.
Then, a month ago, he started a Kickstarter campaign to secure funding for further development of his projects (in addition to Pixelfed, he is working on Loops, a decentralised alternative to TikTok (though whether the world truly needs another time-draining app, decentralised or not, is a debate for another day)).
Within 24 hours, the campaign had already reached its goal of CA$50,000. By its conclusion a month later (yesterday), it had raised an impressive CA$133,559. So Pixelfed is here to stay for quite some time. Although the comparison with Instagram, in terms of users and budget, remains absurd, this is one of those lovely stories from the Fediverse that echoes us of the early years of the web. Long life to Pixelfed!
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