You might have not known that, but there are at least a few new ways you can access Pixiv and browse through the art collections of different creators without logging in or registering for a Pixiv account. These sites will also let you access the content from the US/UK IPs. All this can be pretty important to some of you, especially after the recent updates to the Pixiv terms of service in certain countries. Let’s see what these options are.
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Quick disclaimer: As always, you should be aware that using any third-party service for browsing any kind of social media means your browsing data (such as your IP address and/or search queries) can be visible to the operator of that service. Choose well-known, reputable public instances or consider hosting your own for maximum privacy.
3 Alternative Ways to Browse Pixiv
Pixiv is a platform that in general does require you to have an account to even access most of the art that’s being shared in their collection. However, there are a few methods you can use to access it and search for individual artwork tags as well as artist profiles if you’re not a registered user on the site. These will also help you access the content you want from restricted regions, as they rely on proxy servers for managing your requests.
The first method is one of the simplest and most efficient. It is similar to Nitter, an alternative front-end for browsing X (formerly Twitter) semi-anonymously. The next is a Pixiv content viewer which works in a similar way, but features a different user interface and design. Lastly, you also have an option of creating a temporary account on the site, despite it not accepting most popular temporary email proxies.
All of the tools listed below will also let you filter out AI-generated images, just like the official Pixiv website interface does, which can be quite convenient if you don’t want to be forced to move through the ever-growing amount of AI-generated art that’s widely present on the platform since the emergence of local diffusion models used for image generation back in ~2021.
1. PixivFE
PixivFE is an open-source project which was developed to allow the users without a Pixiv account to have pretty much full accessibility to all of the website’s contents, including images, manga, novels and user profiles and public bookmark collections. As of now, this is one of the best and easiest ways to access the platform without having to register for a user profile.
The feature set of PixivFE contains many of the core features features of the original Pixiv UI, and it’s overall very fast, responsive and simple to use. As already mentioned, this tool is in a sense, very similar to Nitter, which enables you to freely browse X (formerly Twitter), without a registered account. Much like with Nitter, there are different publicly hosted PixivFE instances, a list of which you can find here, and you can also host your own, if you’d like to contribute to the availability of the service.
2. Pixiv Viewer
Pixiv Viewer is another neat tool which can let you browse Pixiv with no user account, at the same time also being another open-source project (you can find the English version of the software readme here). It also offers a neat user interface with a search tool similar to the one you can find on the original site, and it’s overall another great way to easily access the platform.
Keep in mind however, that the official main instance of this tool might not work in all countries/regions due to the site protection features. If Cloudflare does display a blocking page on your end, you can try accessing the site using a VPN. And if you wonder, yes, if you’d like, you can host an instance of this one yourself too.
3. New Account Using a Temporary Email Address
The third, and the last method of accessing Pixiv listed here, although no longer being an “account-less” way to go about it, is creating a dummy account.
As you might already know, Pixiv quite understandably has its own policies at play which will prevent you from using most of the popular temporary email services for registering a new account. However, you can still use services such as Gmailinator, which are able to create temp mailboxes which will be accepted by Pixiv at the time of writing this article.
As a matter of etiquette for temporary accounts, make sure that you delete your dummy account once you no longer need it or you stop using it. Also, you should keep in mind that creating temporary accounts in any web service might fall into a gray area of the platform’s ToS. Make sure that you review all the platform’s rules so as not to risk your accounts getting banned.
Are These Methods Anonymous? – What About The Data Privacy?
With all that said, you might be wondering about one important thing: are these methods anonymous or private in any way? The short answer is, not entirely on their own. When you use a third-party viewer like PixivFE or Pixiv Viewer, your activity is hidden from Pixiv’s servers, but the operator of the viewer instance you’re using can in theory still see your IP address and potentially, depending on how the instance is set up, your search queries.
This means that in a way, you’re just shifting who you’re trusting with your data. As for the last method, which is using a temporary account, this one only hides your name from other users on the platform; Pixiv itself can still see your real IP and link your activity to it. So, if you’re looking for true anonymity, your best bet is to use any of these methods in combination with a trusted VPN service, which will hide your real IP address from all parties involved. That’s it!
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