loading . . . The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix) **So, confession time:** I was recently helping a new client get set up on the Fediverseāguiding them through their first steps into our glorious decentralized galaxy. And seeing it all again through fresh eyes?
_Reader, it was brutal._
So much of what should be _table stakes_ for any social media UX in the year of our Lord 2025 still is missing or deeply broken still. I know progress has been made and a good fight, fought. But those of us who love the Open Social Web can get blinded to the rough edges not yet fixed or not having lived with them, start to consider them not so bad. Beloved, they are that bad. Still.
Let me be crystal clear before we begin: I say all of the below with love for the fediverse.. Deep, stubborn, open-source-loving, billionaire-eschewing love. I want the Open Social Web to win. But wanting it isnāt enough. If we want this thing to thrive we have to face the user experience sins head-onāand maybe even laugh at them a little along the way.
<Caveate>I love native apps like Ivory or Mona or custom web UX like Elk or Phanpy as much or more than any of you but those are all UX bandaids over things we have needed to fix in most cases for years. That time is now.</Caveate>
So I jotted down the seven things that make my clientsā eyes cross. And no, this isnāt me dunking on one app or interface. **Pixelfedāyouāre not off the hook. No snickering, Friendica. These are Fediverse-wide sins.**
And donāt get smug, Bluesky. Youāve got some whoppers in your closet tooāand Iām saving those for another article.
So grab a cup of coffeeāor maybe the nearest comfort blanketāand letās soberly and bravely take a cathartic journey through the Deadly Sins that plague the Fediverseās web UX.
(And any I missed in the comments to this blog post)
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### **1ļøā£ The Sin of Overwhelming Complexity: Instance Selection Paralysis**
Ah yes, we start the OG sin. This oneās been haunting the Fediverse since before most people even knew the Fediverse existed.
Again see this with fresh eyes:
Imagine the moment you decide to join the Fediverse. Youāre feeling a tad noble. Brave. Ready to reclaim your digital life from Big Techās clutches.
Then⦠boom. Youāre confronted with a cryptic list of servers, each with a name that sounds like a cross between a startup pitch and a medieval tavern.
Wait, what? āsocial.town or lemmy.world? climatejustice.social or a server with a frog logo? What am I signing up for here?ā
No warm hand-holding, no curated suggestion. Just a buffet of options that would make even a seasoned sysadminās head spin.No wonder so many people bail before they even get started. Itās like trying to join a secret club when no one will tell you the handshake.
And even our terms āServerā Or āInstanceā make sense in an engineering flowchart but why in all that is holy would we foist those onto users to pretend to understand? At the very least we should talk about new folks joining a āserver communityā of fellow users.
And hereās the harsh truth: even offering _**more than one onboarding āserver communityā choice**_ **is often one too many.**
Even the fix at JoinMastodon for the mobile app only not the web app - while admirable and going in the right direction. If your onboarding flow requires a glossary, a decision tree, and a four-part documentary on federation theory, somethingās gone very wrong. A multi-step wizard isnāt going to save youāitās just a fancier maze. Weāve seen flows that bleed _50% of users per screen_. Thatās not onboarding, **thatās a prescription for a slow-motion rage quit.**
āBut what about decentralization?ā someone valiantly cries from the back row.
Donāt worry: Iām not selling it out. I adore decentralization as much as you and trust me, we donāt have to throw that out to give users onboard for the first time only one server choice. I hear you audibly confused now but trust me, wait for it.
For now I think we can agree that new users to the Fedi need an onboarding experience that doesnāt feel like a grad school entrance exam. I believe a far better way is possible, and Iāll spill the beans in the next post.
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### **2ļøā£ The Sin of Inconsistent Navigation: Timeline Turmoil**
Congrats, you survived the Great Instance Selection Gauntletā¢. Youāve picked your server, verified your email, maybe even uploaded a profile pic. Youāre finally ready to explore your new digital neighborhood.
And thenābam. **Three timelines.**
Not one. Not two. **Three.**
Home, Local, Federatedāeach more enigmatic than the last. The Fediverseās multiple timelines are a beautiful idea in theory, but in practice?
* **Home:** Hopefully your cozy friendsā chatter.
* **Local:** Pretty much your instanceās collective brain dump.
* **Federated:** the cosmic firehose of everything, everywhere, all at once. Many are sure to be in languages you donāt speak. Basically: digital chaos in reverse-chron order.
New users are expected to **intuit the metaphysical difference** between timelines, And honestlyā**why should new users care?** What does each one _do_ for them?
What problem is it solving? No really, Iāll wait.
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### **3ļøā£ The Sin of Remote Interaction Purgatory: Federation Gymnastics**
One of the Fediverseās great promises is universal interactionā**no matter which server someone calls home, you can still follow them, reply, boost, interact.** In theory? Utopian.
In practiceāfor web usersāitās an absolute effing mystery.
Want to boost a post from another instance?
Want to follow someone who lives on a server thatās not your own?
Brace yourself: copy, paste, search, squint at a remote profile view, and whisper a quick prayer to the federation spirits that it _might_ work this time.
Want to reply to a post from a different corner of the Fediverse?
Youād better hope the stars align, the serverās awake, and the fediverse goblins arenāt misbehaving today. Sometimes itās seamless. Sometimes you end up trapped in a **social media escape room** , having to try every door twice.
Itās social networking as performance art: awkward, elaborate, and weirdly beautifulābut **absolutely not** the experience most users signed up for.
And remember the golden UX rule: **every extra step you give a user cuts retention in half.**
That brutal law applies here too. Every clunky redirect, every extra click, every āwait, what do I do now?ā moment sends more would-be users quietly packing.
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### **4ļøā£ The Sin of DM Disasters Waiting to Happen**
**Private messages in the Fediverse: because who doesnāt love social roulette?**
And yet here we are - as on most Fediverse platforms, āDirect Messagesā live right alongside public posts in the same composer, the same timeline view, sometimes even with mostly the same visual styling. You _can_ toggle visibility to āDirectā⦠but will you notice you didnāt? Will you check? Will the UI save you?
Spoiler: It will not.
**One wrong toggle, and your private thought becomes a public reckoning.**
Thereās no special UI wrapper. No bold red warning. No modal that says: āHeads upāyouāre about to tell your boss what you _really_ think, _in public_.ā
Instead, itās all too easy to accidentally post a private message as publicāor vice versa. This isnāt just a newbie trap. **Itās a UX booby trap.**
And letās be real: āDirect Messageā in the Fediverse doesnāt even mean what most users think it means. Itās just a post with limited visibility, sent to a tagged user.
Worse? Thereās no encryption. So itās not just accidentally publicāitās _intentionally insecure_. Itās plaintext dressed up as a secret. There is some fine print warning you, But letās be real: nobody reads fine print mid-conversation.
The result: drama, confusion, and sometimes real harm. All from a UI that treats one of the most sensitive features of a social platform like just another post flavor.
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### **5ļøā£ The Sin of Ghost Conversations and Phantom Follower Counts**
Federation is the Fediverseās secret sauceāand as implemented, its spectral curse. What should be lively, multi-user conversations often arrive with limbs missing.
Replies that clearly _should_ be there are gone. Half the participants never materialize.
Youāre reading a thread and suddenly think: _Wait⦠who is this person even talking to?_
Follower counts of remote users become carnival mirrors: someone shows ā800 followers,ā you see 12.
You follow a fascinating account, only to feel like youāve stepped into a half-lit room where the conversationās already happenedāand half the guests are ghosts. Why does this happen?
Because what you see is only the part of the Fediverse thatās federated _to you._ Each server decides what to fetch, when to fetch itāand sometimes just⦠doesnāt.
Thereās no guarantee your instance will pull in every reply, every participant, or even the full threadāespecially if the original conversation lives on a server it barely talks to.
The result? Phantom threads. Phantom user counts.Hollow outlines of conversations happening elsewhere.
Social interaction becomes confusing swiss-cheese cutouts of themselves.
Itās enough to make you wonder:
_Am I lurking⦠or am I the one being lurked?_
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### **6ļøā£ The Sin of Invisible Discovery: The Content Mirage**
The Fediverse was born to be better than Big Techās social media rage-bait casinoāthat places like X or Facebook designed to mine you for clicks, views, and your soul.
Good call to avoid that. Letās not do that.
And yes, privacy is precious. Zero arguments hereāno oneās asking for surveillance ads or algorithmic doomscrolling.
**But the Fediverse takes that privacy ethos and forgets to replace it with⦠well⦠_anything._**
So what you get instead is discovery by divine accident: No algorithmic curation. No fediverse-wide trending topics. No āhereās whatās buzzing.ā
Just you and The Void.
So new users end up wandering along, stumbling across interesting people and conversations only by sheer luck. Itās charming - but only in a 19th-century explorer way.
Itās less charming when youāre just trying to find a cat meme.
What about Mastodon Search? On paper, itās powerful. In reality, itās opt-in onlyātucked behind an Easter egg hunt of privacy settings. Years after launch, Mastodon Search still surfaces a fraction of a fraction of usersābasically just those whoāve unlocked the āI read the docsā achievement.
And hey, credit where itās due: Eugen and team _**did**_ **build something.** And erred on the side of caution.
Most other Fediverse platforms havenāt even really _tried_ to tackle search yet in a meaningful way.
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### **7ļøā£ The Sin of User Discovery Hell**
Search is one thing. But finding people to followāespecially if youāre newāis where the UX - beyond just search - really starts to melt down.
User discovery in the Fediverse is so decentralized, itās basically unusable. No global directory. No āyou might like.ā No obvious trails to follow.
Just vibes. And maybe a dusty wiki from 2022.
_(Full disclosure: I helped build some of those early directories for journalists and activists. We were literally hand-crafting Excel spreadsheets of accounts worth following. Read that again. No really.)_
Want to create your own curated user list of great accounts? Go for itājust donāt expect to share it. Mastodon lists arenāt public. You canāt even make them public. So they live and die with you, like a mixtape you canāt give to anyone.
And other Fediverse platforms do not even have lists.
Some Fediverse servers maintain public list pages of their user profiles that are on that server ābut good luck using them. Theyāre often:
* Unsortable except by these vague, frustrating options:
* _**Recently active:**_ OK, fine. Credit where due. Good one.
* _**New arrivals:**_ (Newā¦where? From what? And are they āNewā and āAticveā or just lookie-lous that joined then bounced away?)
* _**From this-server-name.com only:**_ What? Why? (See Sin #1.)
* _**From known Fediverse:**_ Iām begging you. What does that even mean to any newbie?
* Unlabeled by any useful tagāeven ones users have publicly applied to themselves.
* Unfiltered, showing accounts that havenāt posted since Obamaās first term and giving no indication whoās worth following now.
* And lastly each serverās public profiles do not flow up to any larger discovery pipeline. So even if you do find cool, active, Jazz fans found by hand from user profile section of the Jazztodon server, no other server benefits but you. Go you. But opportunity firmly lost for fediverse wide discovery.
And letās say you gave up on all of the above. But a new idea struck you:
āI know: like on every other social media platform, I can find cool folks that my friends follow and follow **them**.ā
Yeahā¦no.
Thanks to federation fragmentation - Think you Sin #5 - many of their followingāalthough every last one of them being technically publicāare totally invisible to you in practice. So much for that idea.
Itās a UX turducken. One Sin nested inside another.
You didnāt just fall through the cracksāyouāre _living_ in them.
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### **š The Path to Redemption**
Ok that was withering to write, let alone what it must have been to read. Time for a palate cleanser for both of us: ![Adorable golden retriever puppies] (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrdpDT3eMO7ZBVv39srKhyD9rfVaAHAOW-3mzmx-IiO7qCL8j9439fPDhsKPCFnaiPHx0_fi13eZrFvhwy7YiSAGdTb0tXfqNxum9NAH3Rxy_-Q6s7aW2uZnnu-O9H7nciyNHDI4OIMZbP/s1600/Golden_Retriever_Puppies.jpg)
OK here is another ray of hope:
Remember Iām writing these out of LOVE for the Open Social Web and the fediverse and to improve it.
And letās be clear: these UX sins arenāt as the preachers say, āsins unto death.ā
There is a path to redemption, each one of these is eminently fixable.
These fixed donāt require a pilgrimage to the holy land of W3C working groups or a blockchain duct-taped to the side of the server rack. Weāre not waiting on divine intervention via Fediverse Enhancement Protocol v99.9b.
The path out of UX hell is paved with thoughtful design, a pinch of frontend finesse, and a few determined devs who are tired of watching newcomers bounce off of this experience back into the waiting arms of Big Tech Silos - often doing so with very good reason, and a sense of loss.
And more good news? Many folks have _already_ started making serious strides. Now is the time to push forward.
Lastly, remember: The early open web had UX problems just as gnarlyāand it worked through nearly all of them. The open social web can too.
Iāll dive into the fixes in the next article in this two-part series. Catch you on the other side.
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_This is Part 1 in a two-article series on the**Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience**._
_**Part 2** āour roadmap to redemptionāwill arrive as soon as the author can wrestle their love of the Open Social Web back into prose, ideally before the next major Mastodon fork or the collapse of another Twitter clone._
_In the meantime, if youāve spotted a UX sin I missed, drop it in the comments or send a direct message (just, you know, double-check the visibility setting first)._ https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/06/18/113327.html