Why I'm Leaving the Fediverse (Again)
Over the past few years, I have been on an ongoing quest to find a better social media experience. My journey begins when I originally left Twitter (now X) in light of the whole Musk purchase, which for me marked a turning point in how centralised platforms wield influence. It wasn’t just about disliking a particular CEO or policy change, it was about recognising how little control users really have over the platforms they rely on.
So, I turned my attention to the Fediverse, a decentralised and open alternative that promised a more ethical and user-focused digital future. I initially joined the Fediverse via Mastodon on the "mastodonapp.uk", marking the start of my adventures on the Fediverse, and my interested in decentralised technology. Little did I know that this was going to open the door to a whole new ecosystem—and a lot of unexpected challenges. Oh my, it was it a hard journey.
Joining the Fediverse
To begin with, it was great! I thought it was an amazing and forward-thinking way to reinvent social media as we know it. Everyone else joined the platform with the same attitude in mind–a desire for a better, heathier, more open experience on the social web, not dictated to by the hands of a select few.
It felt like a breath of fresh air. It was truly liberating.
In the interest of truly taking ownership of my online interactions, I then took the bold step to self-host my own Mastodon instance (and we all know how well that went) on a spare Raspberry Pi I had lying around. It worked great until it didn't. All it took was one update for a noob like myself to break everything. Turns out, you really need to know your stuff when it comes to Ruby.
It was clear that the honeymoon period came to an end.
Moving away from Mastodon and using GoToSocial
Disappointed and frustrated, I decided to seek alternatives. I came cross, GoToSocial which looked amazing. It fit my need really well. It's lightweight, designed to run on lower hardware, and it is written in Go, which means it compiles down into a single binary. Nice. It had one catch thought–it was still in alpha at the time.
That didn't stop me thought, so I then moved to GoToSocial which worked okay, but I ended up moving back to another Mastodon instance in the form of "moth.social" – a now shutdown Mastodon instance which marked the home of the Mammoth iOS app which no longer exists.
Again, disappointed, but I decided to give GoToSocial another run for its money. At this stage it was now in beta and featured a bunch of different improvements. I got it running on my Raspberry Pi, and it worked like a charm. It wasn't perfect, but it was able to federate properly with several other thousand instances, broadening my reach to the Fediverse.
No real community
There were a few problems which were persistent across all the platforms I tried. What was it? I had no real social network.
I had no real followers and found there were very few people worth following who were "my type". It was a real challenge to find interesting people (not to say that people on the Fediverse aren't interesting). My friends in the real world weren't on it. Very few of them have even heard of the word "Fediverse" let alone were actually using it. It was just me, and it didn't feel like a community.
Like it or not, the members of the network will determine if the platform makes it. The network effect is key here. In my view, at least, the Fediverse does not check this box. It didn't provide the value I was looking for in a platform and community.
On top of this, the developers of GoToSocial made the decision to include trans / pride flags on the app's homepage by default, which I didn't particularly feel comfortable supporting. They're welcome to their view, but I didn't want to be an advocate for it by hosting software which promotes a message I don't necessarily agree with. Yes, I could include code to remove it, but that's not my point. I don't think it is wise to use software as a means to promote a message / ideology which others may not agree with.
In light of this, I made the decision to stop supporting GoToSocial and to take my server offline in the near feature.
What is next?
And so here we are. My experiment has come to an end, as GoToSocial was my only entry point to the Fediverse. I've moaned about the Fediverse no end of times before on this blog, not to mention the uphill battle with the Online Safety Act too. But the big question you're likely to ask is, will I return? Well, most likely not (unless it is through another service).
That being said, I do have an active presence on Bluesky, which, despite the frustrating community and the echo-chamber like dynamics, I still feel that it has a decent job of progressing the decentralised social web using the AT protocol; a protocol which, I believe is better equipped to deliver on decentralisation than ActivityPub. I might do a separate post on this.
In my opinion, the ActivityPub protocol has failed to deliver on inviting in new users into the microblogging / social space. I'm sure many will disagree with me on that, but the evidence is clear that the Fediverse is slowing down. Checkout the latest figures (as of 04/06/2025) from fedidb.com below:
The total number of users count and the number of monthly active users is fairly stagnant.
Is there hope for the Fediverse?
All things considered, though, I feel like the Fediverse does have a future with CMSs (content management systems) and blogging platforms like WordPress and Ghost. This could be a real hit as users can discover new blogs and content, with the potential to comment on posts from their own servers.
This would work much better as the underlying infrastructure to power the Fediverse already exists in the form of web hosts, which is paid for by the site owner. Everything is managed by the site admin (owner) with no need to bring in a whole community to their site. This means, fewer overhead costs from both a financial and resource perspective, which (hopefully) won't inhibit future growth.
Win, win, win.
