Hiyo, I recently made a Pixelfed account for my virtual photography stuff. Pixelfed is basically the fediverse version of Instagram, and virtual photography is... photography that is virtual, pretty much just game captures. I joined the 'pixelfed.social' instance because it was the largest english language one, but they all interconnect with each other.
For background, I have been looking to try an alternative place to host my virtual photography stuff for a while, with Pixelfed being my first choice as I was previously posting it on Instagram & Flickr. I have also considered 'Cara.app' because they are anti AI art (not that they can do much to stop scraping), and potentially a standalone Neocities site or incorporating it into this one. Still undecided about Cara, it just seems a bit more 'serious artist' targeted for my stuff, which is just for fun, and I don't know if I want to bother double posting my stuff again. As for Neocities, I think I would hit the 1GB limit after a while with all the photo files, and I am mainly looking for a free option.
This past week I deleted my Flickr account, they made some recent changes like preventing you from redownloading your stuff on a free account (so people don't use it as a photo cloud), and they don't seem like they care about AI stuff (posting or scraping). Also deleted my virtual photography Instagram, I just don't really want to use that site at all anymore, lots of data privacy/ethical issues.
I also finally started to post stuff to my new Pixelfed! So far it has all been fine, it's familiar in style and layout. I like that it lets you choose the license your work is published under, with the full variety of creative commons licenses available. I decided to start posting all of my stuff under CC0 public domain license, because I just do this for fun without any desire or expectation to make money from it. Maybe other people can find a use for a bunch of stylized photos from video games XD
Pixelfed also has some sort of 'portfolio' feature for people taking their photography or art more seriously. I might enable it at some point and actually see how it works, but from what I saw of it you can kind of curate your best stuff in a separate page (like any online 'portfolio' I guess). It can also just be set to show your most recent posts. The website isn't setting off any of my browser add ons either, so no issues with Ublock adblocker, or privacy badger, which is nice! (EDIT: I did enable it, and wrote a post about it here)
So far, it seems like the most approriate option for me and my virtual photography hobby. I believe Pixelfed has like 750K users, so it pales in comparison to the megacorp sites. I'm not aware of how anyone would make money from it compared to Instagram (sponsored posts) or how large your following could be with a much smaller userbase. It does seem like a very decent alternative if you just want to post your photos or art for the sake of it, or as an easily accessible online portfolio. It isn't a walled garden as far as I can tell, so as long as somebody has the link to your account page, they can see everything without being forced to create an account, unlike with Instagram, twitter, etc.
Anyway, I will make another post if I ever try Cara out, or some other alternative, but I am pretty happy with Pixelfed for the time being! Visit My virtual photography Pixelfed profile if you are interested, my handle for that stuff is now 'digital_potato' :)
*Edited 22/05/25: added a link to the follow up post where I tried out pixelfed's portfolio feature*