# 🚨Mod Announcement🚨
Our instance, chaosfem.tw, has made the decision to defederate from Pixelfed instances, at least for the time being. We feel the need to announce this as it may affect our users-- Pixelfed claims to have 150,000 monthly active users. Some of our own users have accounts there and likewise many of our users interact with other Pixelfed accounts from our instance.
## Why?
Pixelfed is leaking our data, and, it seems, the data of any other instance it federates with on Mastodon. We've been confused and tracking this for some time, but have been uncertain what was happening exactly. This post sums up the issue better than I can:
fokus.cool/2025/03/25/pixelfed…
It's clear that this leak is not a priority for Dansup, the sole maintainer of Pixelfed.
However, it's a danger for instances like ours, with vulnerable users, but realistically, it's a danger for any instance to expect privacy and have it neglected and disrespected to this degree.
## Will we federate with Pixelfed instances in the future?
Idk, possibly? But at the very least, we must have assurance that a particular pixelfed instance has been updated to v1.12.5 in order for us to even consider federating again. However, there are serious concerns about the fact that Pixelfed is run by someone who is hostile and neglectful to the Mastodon community and has a history of not taking security concerns seriously. And moreover, Pixelfed doesn't even have federated blocking implemented, so the only thing that can be done is to defederate, and even then, this only affects *new* posts.
## Difficulty
Like Mastodon, Pixelfed is a separate project built on ActivityPub protocol, so it's not as simple as blocking another instance. This is blocking the entire project, and the instances running it. We don't make this decision lightly, and we hope you understand why we felt this necessary to protect our users who deserve an expectation of privacy.
Trivial Einstein reshared this.