The Fediverse is Not the Way Forward – Trial and Failure

The Fediverse is Not the Way Forward

04 Jul, 2026

If I do say so myself, I have done a commendable job of tearing myself away from the clutches of Big Tech and social media. Facebook I maintain only for its messenger. Reddit I only use to find information unavailable elsewhere. Everything else I never really used.

But occasionally I'll feel a tug toward a more social web-browsing experience. It would be rather nice to purposefully immerse myself in the Discourse™ rather than relegating my online reading to a simple, lonely RSS feed (albeit one that I created specifically to avoid the Discourse™). But I stepped away from Facebook and Reddit for some very good reasons, which I'll outline below. Isn't there another way to engage with social media that isn't so terrible?

Why, yes! At least, so claim proponents of the Fediverse, who, as I understand it, likely have an appreciable overlap with people who care enough about the Smallweb to unearth no-name sites like this humble blog. I recall dipping my toes into the Fediverse several years ago, but not sticking around. Recently I decided to drop in again to see how it's evolved, and whether it could prove a worthy investment of time for someone like me, who has the wherewithal and tech savviness to navigate experiences less tailored to the lowest common denominator but decidedly does not have the free time or energy to commit himself to a half-baked, user-hostile, and frustrating labyrinth of design. So where does the Fediverse fall?

To give some order to these thoughts, I'll first explain the things that drove me away from traditional social media, followed by the understanding I'd gleaned about how the Fediverse ostensibly remedies those things. Finally, I'll recount my research about whether it lives up to its hype before laying out my verdict and detailing my future plans.

Big Tech Hates Your Guts<br>At some point a few months ago I came to realize that browsing Facebook no longer provided me with any benefit. In fact, my moods were always decidedly more sour after scrolling than before. Facebook was supposed to be my way of staying connected with acquaintances and friends, but had long since devolved into an endless torrent of ads, AI slop, and posts from pages and people I'd never heard of before and certainly had never subscribed to, but had been foisted onto my wall regardless. As well, and far more discouragingly, it became clear that staying in touch with people I actually know, or knew, provided far less value to me than I had expected. Everything had become so stressful, and almost everything was centered around politics. Everything was so polarized that my feed could be an echo chamber or a battleground, but nothing in between. That is not conducive to healthy interaction, and it's especially not healthy for relationships I hope to maintain.

Reddit, meanwhile, retained its utility, but only provided that I used it as a visitor rather than as a participant. As a visitor, it is among the final bastions of the Internet that you can be sure is at least mostly composed of human-generated content. (That may change in time as AI slop continues its loathsome permeation, however.) Since Reddit itself is entirely text-based, it remains accessible and efficient, and appending site:reddit.com is still the best way to make Google search queries return anything approaching useful. As a participant, though, the experience leaves much to be desired. The oft-denigrated Reddit "hive mind" is an effective, albeit rather oversimplified, way of conceptualizing it. If your post or comment reaches a score of 0, it is incredibly likely that it will be dogpiled upon by people who downvote it just because that's what everyone else is doing. If a Reddit score ever was a decent measure of value, it certainly is not now, nor has it been for many years. Comments that are censored by virtue of their low score are usually just as constructive, helpful, or relevant as those that are highly upvoted; to believe otherwise indicates, in my mind, that one has fallen prey to some heavy confirmation bias. Even if you fall into lockstep with a particular subreddit's culture and behavioral expectations, Reddit moderators are infamous for abusing their power. You can be banned for no apparent reason and left with no recourse or appeal, or even an explanation after the fact for what you did to invoke the mods' ire. Strangely, Reddit as a whole has a very bipolar cultural response to mod- and downvote-related criticisms; if you share these criticisms, sometimes you'll be met with commiseration, while other times people will use your experience as evidence that you're secretly a troublemaker. Given the sheer volume of subreddits, it's possible to leave behind the ones with particularly nasty mods, but you can never be sure when some clique of powermods has left you banned without notice from subreddits you hadn't even visited. (In...