Tangential caution to anyone wanting to try Pixelfed. Host your own instance and post on it. The official pixelfed.social is no better than Instagram in banning

Tangential caution to anyone wanting to try Pixelfed. Host your own instance and post on it. The official pixelfed.social is no better than Instagram in banning accounts for no reason except that the main developer of Pixelfed (who is also the admin of that instance) thinks of something as spam without reading and without issuing warnings or any indications. Unlike Instagram, which at least has an appeals process (in theory), he doesn’t respond to emails and doesn’t respond to queries sent through other platforms where he’s active either. I learned it the hard way that whether you choose a centralized platform or decentralized platform, you’re at the mercy of algorithms or someone’s emotions and trigger happy fingers. Your data is never your data when you’re on someone else’s hosted platform.