A lot of you have known me from the Fediverse, hell, that's probably the majority of you.
But you can see that I'm no longer active. I made a brief return on my own instance, but that fell apart and I didn't bother to put it back together.
Okay, yeah, I guess I should preface this for people who don't know what the Fediverse is. (skip this if you know what I'm talking about)
The Fediverse (pormanteau of "federated" and "universe") is a collective of several independent sites that use the ActivityPub or similar protocols so their users can talk to each other while still remaining independent sites.
The most famous of the softwares that run these sites is Mastodon, but there are others such as Misskey (and it's many forks), Pleroma, Akkoma, etc.
You can think of it like the "email" of social networking because that is essentially what it is. You could be on catgirl.club and I could be on derg.rest and we could still have a conversation in a Twitter-like style.
There are many benefits to this approach of social media. Decentralization means it can't be blocked by your government, work, or, in my case, my school, and prevents exploitation of users. You have complete control over where your data is hosted. You can used the software you want, while still being able to communicate with anyone else over any other software, and interact with the people you choose to.
There are many reasons why I chose to do so, which I hope to go over now.
The main reason I don't like the fediverse is that it's WAY too easy to create an echo chamber of people who only share your viewpoint of the world. People use "#fediblock" hashtag to signal out to users the ""problematic"" person/instance they found and create lengthy lists of these """bad actors""".
Don't get me wrong, a lot of these people genuinely deserve to go to hell (pedos, nazis, etc.), but some people go overboard and block people on a whim simply because they said something they didn't like.
I get that this isn't exactly exclusive to the Fediverse, but it's, again, a LOT easier to do when you have complete control over everything.
Drama on the Fediverse comes in many different forms, and when it happens, you could walk away scot-free, or end up losing connections that you deeply valued and that took weeks or even months to build.
Worst case scenario, you loose your account and aren't able to export your posts. Or the servers #fediblock/defederate each other and now you can't talk to your friends anymore.
That can be solved by just running your own instance, but that requires technical know-how that not everyone has the patience or time to learn. It would be awesome if people could learn tech-savvy things easily. But practically, people have lives, jobs, etc. and aren't going to give anywhere close to a shit about learning that stuff. Running your own instance can cost valuable time and effort, too. Not to mention maintaining it.
Suffering from the same problem email does now that Gmail dominates everything. If you get defederated by a large instance like mastodon.social then you're pretty much screwed because most people are there, and won't people to see anything you post.
Markdown on Mastodon, anyone? Pleroma chats on Misskey? Yeah, no, it's not going to happen because those extras were never the main focus, or the developers simply refuse to even budge on what should be a very simple feature to implement.
And if you're a Misskey user? Surely you'd want a nice heart reaction on that one post, but now all you get is a big fat ⭐️ from someone on a Mastodon server who doesn't know what the hell you're talking about when you reply "What's with the 🤔"
Me, a 16y/o: "Oh, what a cool looking person, and they have such a cute avatar, I can't wait to follow the-"
To be frank, this is a problem everywhere online these days, and the people who participate in this are either ignorant assholes, porn accounts, or both.
This almost drove me to make my Fediverse only available to people under 18, since these people care so much about "InTeRnEt SaFteY fOr MiNoRs". (by not providing somewhat of a safe space for, and instead criminalizing, what is a completely natural human experience. -_-)
Like, no, seriously, that's how much this pisses me off.
Not even every adult user wants to see that shit (asexuals, I feel your pain). And, no, filters are a bandaid at best.
Because, unless you're one of those small "iNflUenCerS", nobody gives a shit.
Use XMPP, Matrix, or even IRC to talk to friends if you want something open source/private. The Fediverse adds unneccessary complexity to what should be a simple task.
This may have gotten a bit ranty towards the end, but hope you enjoyed reading anyway, and I hope it provided a valid explanation to why I left.