Making this post instead of just figuring it out myself is maybe a very lazy thing to do, but here:

I made a pixelfed account a while ago and it seemed kind of hard to navigate and I also only saw a handful of posters. However, since then I have seen loads of people mentioning it across lemmy, and from them I get the impression it’s actually more active than I assumed? With a lot more posters.

So if anyone can give some tips for how to navigate and get started on it, it would be appreciated. I have some specific questions:

  • Does pixelfed have instances like Lemmy does, or is it just one instance?
  • What is it federated with? Can, I for instance, view Pixelfed posts from Lemmy?
  • Just to double check - it doesn’t have DMs like Instagram, right?
  • Does it utilise tags on posts, like Instagram used to do and tumblr does?
  • Any specific ethos I have to bear in mind, like “don’t post too much” or “only post your own stuff”?

Thank you.

  • Otter@lemmy.ca
    2·
    7 days ago

    Expanding on a few areas that the other comment didn’t cover:

    1. It has a focus on federation with Mastodon, and so you can take advantage of that whole side of the fediverse. For Lemmy, you can tag a community (as if you were tagging a person) and it will show up there. You can’t tag a bunch of communities though, and I imagine that is to prevent spam. If you view a Pixelfed user on here, you will only see the posts that tagged a specific community. I’m hoping that changes in the future. Pixelfed was also exploring their own implementation of groups / communities, but it will likely be a while before that is implemented.

    2. It does have DMs

    3. For culture, you could see the results of a census we ran: https://fedecan.ca/en/announcements/2026-04-03_censusResults#_3-2-pixelfed-related-questions

    Generally I would say

    • post as much as you want to
    • if you post something you sourced from elsewhere, just mention it and give credit where its due. People won’t complain unless you are lying or trying to take credit for someone else’s work
  • Zachariah@lemmy.world
    2·
    7 days ago
    1. Yes, there are multiple instances
    2. I think there’s some interoperability between Lenny and PixelFed, but I haven’t tried
    4. #yesitdoes
    5. I’d say post what you want and see whether the votes and comments are what you want (or ignore that altogether and just do your thang)