Introduction

Photo sharing the way it should be. Pixelfed lets your casual shots and creative photography find their audience naturally, without algorithmic barriers. Join millions of people sharing across the fediverse.

AI-Generated Contributions

AI-generated contributions are not accepted.

Pull requests, patches, documentation, translations, issues, or other contributions that are substantially generated by generative AI or large language models will not be accepted.

Contributors are expected to understand, author, and take responsibility for the work they submit. Tools such as linters, formatters, autocomplete, spellcheckers, and other non-generative development tools are unaffected by this policy.

PHP Support

Notice: While older unsupported PHP versions might work, we recommend using the recommended version.

• PHP 8.5 (Recommended) - Our baseline for testing/Docker images.
• PHP 8.4 (Supported) - Active support ends 31 Dec 2026.

Reference: https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

Database Support (Please report any regressions)

• MySQL 8+ is officially supported (Strict mode is not default).
• MariaDB 11+ is officially supported (Strict mode is default).
• PostgreSQL 14+ is best effort as of writing (Not recommended).

Notice: We need to improve the ecosystem to test/validate the codebase to be database agnostic, but this will require considerable engineering effort. Thank you for your understanding.

Official Documentation

• As of September 2026, we recommend using Docker compose to run your instances. Non-docker is obviously supported, but the Dockerfile will be maintained and updated with best practices and latest releases.

Documentation for Pixelfed can be found on the Pixelfed documentation website.

API/Developer Documentation

API and Developer documentation for Pixelfed can be found on the Pixelfed Developers website.

License

Pixelfed is open-sourced software licensed under the AGPL license.

Communication

The ways you can communicate on the project are below. Before interacting, please read through the Code Of Conduct.

• Matrix: matrix.to/#/#pixeldev:matrix.org
• Mastodon: @pixelfed@mastodon.social
• E-mail: hello@pixelfed.org

Pixelfed Sponsors

We would like to extend our thanks to the following sponsors for funding Pixelfed development. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please visit the Pixelfed Patreon Page

• NLnet Foundation and NGI0 Discovery, part of the Next Generation Internet initiative.

This project is supported by:

Host your own instance with these unofficial cloud providers

Pixelfed app for YunoHost. See the package source code