Pixelfed
Introduction
I have mentioned the Fediverse before, and Pixelfed is one of the apps that is ActivityPub-compliant. It is an Instagram-alternative, with all the federation features you expect. You can follow people from other instances of Pixelfed without issue, but if you follow a non-PixelFed account, you will only see posts that have images attached, or those that are replies to your own post.
This is, of course, less flexible than Mastodon - where I follow some PeerTube (YouTube-like) channels, Castopod (podcast) channels, and Pixelfed accounts - but it is a platform that looks and works remarkably like Instagram, so it has its niche.
The Home Instance
The main developer of Pixelfed hosts pixelfed.social, which is where people tend to create accounts if they either don't understand federation or don't want to choose a server. It is the largest Pixelfed server by quite the margin, and it is the first domain to target if one intends to block Pixelfed intances.
All Pixelfed instances saw a surge of signups after Meta opted to relax its hate-speech moderation rules. With this demographic being less aware of how federation works (compared to those already on Pixelfed), pixelfed.social saw the biggest boost.
What Did Facebook Do?
As you have guessed from the title and the heavy background information, Facebook is blocking links to pixelfed.social, immediately removing them. This was first reported by AJ Sadauskas on Bluesky, and 404 Media verified this behaviour. The reason provided was that "the post may use misleading links or content to trick people to visit, or stay on, a website".
The simplest explanation here is obviously that Meta is attempting to stem the outflow of users by preventing them from sharing their new Pixelfed accounts with their friends. Do I have evidence in support of this statement? No, but I believe Meta's track record speaks for itself.
DistroWatch
Introduction
DistroWatch.com is a website dedicated to disseminating information about open source operating systems for computers, with Linux and BSD seeing the most attention. It has plenty of tutorials aimed at Linux users of all experience levels, starting from utter beginners to experienced users, and also maintains a list of places to buy hardware that is compatible with Linux operating systems.
What Did Facebook Do?
A whole bunch of stuff, most of it inexplicable.
According to DistroWatch's newsletter, Facebook began labelling groups associated with Linux as cybersecurity threats, and many Facebook groups associated with discussions about Linux have been shut down. Many other have had their posts removed as well.
Some users have had their accounts locked for making multiple attempts to discuss Linux or post links to DistroWatch. Posts get deleted because they "may facilitate the sharing, creation, or hosting of malicious software". The editor of DistroWatch also had his account locked when he attempted to appeal this decision, and was told that linux-related content would stay on the cybersecurity filter.
Facebook's servers run on Linux, and they have had multiple talks about this in open source conferences. They are also the number one member of the CentOS Special Interest Group for large-scale users. They routinely have job postings for Linux developers. With Linux being such a popular server operating system, none of this is a surprise, so it could be anybody's guess why Meta went down this route.
What Do We Do?
The sole decision on server moderation on any social media site comes from the server owner. On the fediverse, you are able to migrate your accounts from one instance to another, choosing the server whose moderation you want to be subject to.
You can also try to follow news from sources other than Facebook, the OG method being RSS feeds. These are typically pages on a website that maintain a list of recent publications from the website itself. RSS reader apps check RSS feeds regularly and present updates from all selected feeds to the user.