This essay seeks to examine the breadth of donor-funded, open source, federated social networks as technical alternatives to commercial online environments like Facebook and Twitter as measured by their users’ overall satisfaction with them as means of social interactivity over time. Following recent debates and confusion regarding the ethics in the practices of the organizations which built them and the extent of their complicity in the radical cultural consequences of digital communication surrounding the United States’ Presidential Election in 2016, it proposes that greater rhetorical and legislative attention be invested in tangible, documented design decisions of their products as the most crucial, relevant, and effective means of understanding the whole context.