How to get started with pixelfed?
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.
Expanding on a few areas that the other comment didn't cover:
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.
It does have DMs
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