what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?

[sciatrix]

So muccamukk hosted a set of questions for the Fediverse over at her blog today, and impertinence has done a really nice job of answering them from the perspective of social systems, moderation, and how communities attempting to avoid worst-case-scenarios really work.

I think, though, that I'm still uneasy, and I'm fundamentally uneasy because to me what I am hearing echoed from the various Fediverse/p2p/Mastodon schools of How Fandom Should Do Next is that the future of fandom should be decentralized and spread around many small communities, each maintained and monitored by a few moderators. Like a set of fiefdoms, but administered without hereditary rule, with mobile users who can transfer allegiances from one fiefdom to another quickly--at least in theory.

I think I am uneasy because I am concerned about handing out ultimate power--as opposed to social power--to many different people of unpredictable ethics and morality, with limited ability to leave a toxic space without abandoning friends and limited ways of getting in touch with people who follow. I'm going to talk out loud for a minute to see if I can pin that down.

One of the things I like about the structure of Dreamwidth is that the communities that do form here, and around individual users, are like... a series of connected salons, with both personal and public spaces for everyone, such that anything I post to my personal journal is mine and mine alone and anything I post to a community is surrendered to the moderators of that community, who I can know and trust ahead of time without ever necessarily stepping under their authority, just by reading publicly. It is not clear to me that you can do that on these decentralized fediverse systems.

Another thing I like is that the ultimate authority on how a service will be hosted and moderated is not someone who is modding the individual communities, such that relationships breakdowns with a moderator of a particular community has zero impact on my ability to interact with the rest of Dreamwidth. The odds that I will fall into a personal acrimony with denise or mark is slim to none; they straight up don't have the personal bandwidth to necessarily notice me as a person, and I feel safer in that anonymity.

Metafilter is the inverse of that, in some ways--it's a service where the site owner is also an active moderator, and where he and the mod team really do publicly interact in places where I might converse with them anywhere, and my ability to speak on the site at all is definitely mediated by my being a member in good standing with those mods--but also, I can see them and observe them and decide whether I trust the judgement of the MeFi mod team beforehand. I trust that even when I disagree with them, they'll still be decent people to me, and I can do that based on long observance.

So why am I uneasy about a fediverse instance while I'm comfortable on Metafilter, which operates (as far as I can tell) like one enormous federated instance? I cut my teeth on forums; why am I balking at this?

...oh.

Oh, oh, oh.

I've watched so many dysfunctional forums, is the thing, with a lot of dysfunctional modding carried out by people who had neither the skill nor the confidence to have any business modding, who didn't know how to manage a community and didn't take community stewardship seriously as its own thing. I've made the decision to leave forums based on moderation and known grimly that unless things were bad enough to take a significant fraction of users with me--and at one point, I was in that situation!--that I was giving up a lot of my ability to get back in touch with people later, including people who I was really fond of, and that my friendships would have to be very strong indeed to survive a platform migration.

I'm thinking of fediverse as like the old forum systems, but without the option to lurk before deciding to trust someone, and with spinning up a new forum also including some outlay of actual hard cash, so that fewer people can try it.

Woof.

No wonder I'm feeling cagey.

Comments

[sciatrix]

Mmmmhm, that is also the vibe I get. And like, for me, that "go off and build a new server" thing feels more like a platform shift for everyone, with all the outlay that entails, than it does being able to step away from a toxic community but still maintain your existing networks.

[elf]

A key aspect of the Fediverse that's not being covered well in the discussions: These aren't like "every admin sets up their own DW comm/email list/online forum." It's like, "every admin sets up their own tiny Livejournal clone that can have a readlist that draws from any of the other clone sites."

The hosts have control because they're paying for server space. Because they're (somewhat) liable for the content under their control. In addition to all the tiny-fiefdoms problems, there will be an endless string of, "eep our host graduated, got a serious day job, and decided to stop wasting time (and money) on maintaining the server. Everyone download what you can and find a new place, quick!" And that's if you get warning, and not just "server host stopped posting a couple of months ago, and we tried to log in today and found the namespace is gone."

For the tiny-diverse-fediverse to work, you have to trust the server host.

[olivermoss]

I agree. Fediverse stuff as it stands is very isolating. With small separated subgroups, one person can throw the dynamic from healthy to totally toxic. It also reminds me of the old days when people used coded terms to hide smut, yaoi and rpf. The old 'if you don't know we won't tell you' mentality. That is what I keep running into in Mastodon. It's super gatekeepery and every time there is a gate I wind up on the wrong side of it.

I keep seeing article on where fandom should go next and they all mention Mastodon, but very rarely mention DW. The article talk like Mastodon is THE place for pretty much the sort of content and atmosphere I like but I can never get into an instance where the party is allegedly happening. I've had a lot of bad experiences over there and am not eager to give it another try.

[kara_mckay]

Yup, me, too. Arriving at DW was like coming home. I'm interested in federated fandom because I don't want to end up in the spot where I found myself when LJ started falling apart. People were scattering, and everyone wanted to adopt a wait and see attitude, but waiting and seeing ended up meaning losing people. Then, there was some resistance to Tumblr in some quarters, which I absolutely understand. By the time the Next Thing became just The Thing, I felt too far out of step to catch up, and I just drifted. I don't plan to leave DW, but if it's within my abilities, I'll definitely set up fandom's Next Thing so I have it ready if needed.

I use Discord to call my son downstairs to bring in groceries. Sometimes I send him cat pictures. That's my entire use of Discord.

[jesse_the_k]

“Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.”

I remember when it was a “fun challenge.” (I was younger and healthier.) I don’t know if it’sinherently gendered, but I do know that fiddling around with code will always be more attractive to some folks than reaching Finnish consensus

[jadislefeu]

I just keep being like--what happens if people stop being able to afford all these servers everywhere? Or the person hosting burns out on keeping it up? It's relying on so many people to do so much work. Even if you want to assume they all mean well and moderate perfectly and don't go off on power trips or flounce. I modded a discord of several hundred people for a while and it was just a mind-boggling amount of work. For a reward of basically 'people get mad at you for making different decisions than they would have'. And the people running instances will have to own domains, which will make them more easily doxxable by someone who doesn't like their ruleset (because they allow underage or ship the wrong thing in a contentious fandom or etc etc etc).

Muccamukk above said they're going to jump in and try it outt, but honestly I just don't have the mental bandwidth to maintain presences in too many places at once, if I tried to jump into this federated stuff I'd end up having to drop something I use already. I'd already ditched tumblr months ago because I couldn't keep up with both it *and* twitter *and* discord.

[brithistorian]

Ah, so that's what this whole federated thing is trying to emulate. I've been looking at it and trying to figure out what's the point and why it just made me kind of twitchy to think about it and I think I'm starting to get it now.

And it still has the social problems around different sites with different mod policies and people not trusting the mods on other sites.

And not just "not trusting the mods" but having to deal with mods with wildly different goals. If I'm running Nazi-Free Federated, I'm going to have very good reasons why I don't want to connect my instance with White Power Federated. So, um, yeah - I expect the whole "all of Federated can talk to all the rest of Federated" to last until - well, I'm very surprised it's still working now. (Is it still working now?)

[muccamukk]

That's why I keep asking exactly what the cloning is going to clone (posts, networks, pictures, comments, what?), but I haven't really gotten an answer yet.

[muccamukk]

I don't want anyone to overstate how much bandwidth (literally or metaphorically) I'm going to put into my Very Detailed Explorations of this topic.

[sciatrix]

I mean, mine is likely to be limited to this post right here, unless I see something to the effect of "this is the way we're going, we have ironed out the bugs, it's user friendly now, we're out of alpha and into beta." And I'm fine with that.

Pillowfort is in, what, its third year of dev? And I'm not convinced it's learned the right lessons, either, and after that boneheaded TOS move and the server issues, I lost a lot of faith in its ability to negotiate the hard ethical choices that are my highest priority. Other people's highest priority might be the ability to easily pass along images, or a seamless user interface, or to never, ever again be exploited by a for-profit enterprise, or to simply be where the greatest volume of fandom is happening.

I'm real tired of platform migrations, and I'm tired of big ideas that aren't deliberately crafted to minimize the damage of the inevitable worst-case-scenario byproducts of humans humaning at one another.

[sciatrix]

And the amount of work that will need to be put into running things for so many people, to be totally unpaid! Like, this circles back around to the monetizing-fandom discussion: I feel pretty strongly that it's better to pay a few people for full-time labor than to expect many many people to contribute a lot of unpaid labor in their spare time, on top of whatever the hell else they're doing, and to run the behind-the-scenes work of my entire social network on top of that.

I say this as someone who has put substantial amounts of my own money in to running my own offline community, as someone who has volunteered to moderate in her spare time before and probably will again, and also as someone who is strung out and tired and perpetually broke, too.

More on that this week, probably; I got to make some tough financial calls with the spouse this weekend, and that is going to be a thing I spend some time thinking about.

[sciatrix]

Oh my god yes this! I am so concerned about this it's giving me the screaming horrors.

[muccamukk]

I really hope someone not me writes a meta post about how fucking exhausting losing tumblr has been for everyone. I didn't even ruddy like tumblr and almost never used it, but seeing yet another fan hub slowly slide sideways into the flames of oblivion taking years of fannish blood sweat and tears with it has just been awful.

[sciatrix]

DING DING DING--thank both of you for identifying the similarity of this to Discord, which seems very similar to a lot of the Fediverse concepts being bandied around EXCEPT:

a) Discord does not require server mods to, well, pay for literal servers, so the outlay of cost to a small server is minimal
b) Discord does not necessarily have the anti-Nazi pro-fandom stance I think a lot of us are looking for
c) Discord is incredibly user-friendly and relatively easy to explain compared to what has been happening with these other protocols (it's a system of networked IRC chat rooms and channels! like Slack, which is also increasingly popular!)

I mean. I have to wonder if the reason Discord is not popping up in these discussions as the fannish center of activity it honestly is is that it's much conceptually more difficult to position these protocols as a welcoming haven for fandom when, if ease-of-use rather than freedom from corporations or freedom from unclear business models is your fannish priority... well, Discord has them beat.

For now, anyway.

and for what it's worth, I don't love Discord. I really don't love that it is entirely private-facing, with no public-facing space to discover people or talk to people without being friends of friends, and I prefer to interact with folks publicly anyway. But in terms of ease of use and explanation, I think it is heads and shoulders above these protocols

[jayeless]

I have found Mastodon very hard to get into. Every guide that I've read always stresses, "Choosing the right instance is the most important part!" and yet… that rather requires you to already be familiar with a number of instances, which you're probably not if you're only just signing up!

It is basically like Twitter, but it's true that your experience is highly dependent on the instance you join (despite how unfriendly this is to new people). Different instances have different rules, so some are swamped by pornbots, others allow Nazis, and then you have some that actually expect their users to be real people who adhere to certain standards of behaviour. Many instances refuse to federate with Nazi/pornbot instances, but then sometimes instances refuse to federate for petty reasons… like just recently one stopped federating with the flagship instance because they felt it was too big and popular. If you were a user on that instance who DOESN'T want everyone on the largest instance to be blocked from your content, now you have to migrate… and while you can migrate your past toots over, I don't think you can bring your followers over with you. So people are reluctant to do that.

I feel like I like the idea of decentralisation and federation in theory, for similar reasons as – way back when – I liked that DW let users crosspost to other LJ-based sites and users of other sites could use OpenID to be granted access and post comments here. Just that the more things are federated, the fewer parallel accounts you'd have to maintain to talk to people – and it's also a nice escape from the advertiser-beholden major platforms of today. And yet, the actual experience of using it hasn't exactly grabbed me. Discovery is really hard, and I still haven't found enough users whose toots I enjoy to keep me coming back reliably. And while decentralisation certainly solves some problems, the moderation issues are definitely a new one being introduced.

[megpie71]

To be honest, to me the fediverse stuff really does sound like people are trying to recreate Usenet over HTTP with more picture content. And the big problem with Usenet, the thing which effectively killed it eventually, was without readily accessible servers reasonably close to you, which served the groups you wanted to keep up with, you couldn't follow those groups.

I can remember the fun of moving from Perth to Canberra, changing ISPs, and having to re-find all my various groups so I could keep up with things (and there were a couple the ISP in Perth carried that the ISP in Canberra didn't... then that ISP in Canberra went under, and I had to change ISPs, and oh goody, can I actually follow any of these groups they have on their list or are they all there for show to say "oh yes, you can subscribe to over a gazillion newsgroups with our service", without actually getting any of the content?). Then the second ISP in Canberra decided they weren't going to carry Usenet any more, because everyone was moving to the World Wide Web, and "you can just get it all from Google Groups anyway, right?".

Which is why I'm a leetle bit wary of the fediverse idea to begin with. Yeah, it's a nice notion. Now let me know whether there's a server anywhere which works in my timezone - preferably in my city, so I can go and talk to the admin in person when problems arise.

[aka_vamp]

A lot of the hubzilla people (hubzilla is the only software that clones, afaik) are still working all of this out too. Pre-beta, testing etc, it's all happening right now.

Anyway, I've cloned my channel. On the odd occasion when the fandom hub is down or slow, I can just switch over to my cloned channel on a different hub (instance), and keep merrily interacting as the me from the fandom hub. If the fandom hub disappeared, I'd still have all my contacts and, it seems, my post history, and comments. YMMV, this is just from casual observation. I'm not sure about uploaded files, images and stuff, but I'm pretty sure you can download and then upload all that stuff anyway (you'd need prior notice of said hub disappearing of course).

With Hubzilla, we're all still figuring this stuff out for ourselves, once we know for sure what happens when we press 'button X', we're documenting the hell out of that crap!

On Mastodon, if your instance is shutting down/turns to shit and you want to leave, you can download a file containing your follows, and when you move to another instance, you can import that file and have all your follows right there. You can also export your post history but as of now you cannot import this to the new instance.

I hope this helps. Generally, if you don't get an answer, it's because the ones testing the stuff don't know for sure yet. But that is coming, as we continue poking at things to see what they do.

(by the way, many of the people poking at things and documenting things are non-techy types)

[aka_vamp]

User experience on Mastodon really does rely on the atmosphere of the instance, like REALLY REALLY.

fandom.ink has been great btw. It's just been closed again to keep the numbers under control but any current member can give you an invite if you want one.

It's well moderated with sane rules and the mod is awesome. I totally trust them with my stuff.

[wolffyluna]

Agreed. (It reminds me a lot of Pillowfort's decision to make edits proliferate through reblogs. Because yes, the fact edits don't 'go down the chain' does cause problems on tumblr, but the reason they don't proliferate like that is because that *also* causes problems. You can't just do the opposite of tumblr and get a good social network out of it.)

[muccamukk]

Awesome! Can I ask you questions (as far as you know of course!) I'm so curious about how this works. I asked a couple more technical questions over on my threads, but I think no one was sure? I wish ppl would just say they didn't know. That's fine if everyone's still figuring stuff out, I'd just like to know that. (I think people are so enthusiastic about Shiny New Thing that maybe it's seeming to me as more advanced than it actually is.)

When you clone, what does that move to the other server, exactly? Like your preferences and contacts list? Or other stuff too.

If I make a blog post on my steam on one instance, and then clone to the other, does the blog post go? Or does it stay on the instance I put it on? What about other people's comments on your posts? Comments or meta data for pictures, if not the pictures or other uploads themselves?

Basically, what I'm trying to figure out is how hard it would be to reconstruct a blog space if I had to hope between instances (for whatever reason).

I'm probably going to get around to poking at things myself. I just haven't worked out where I want to be yet.

[kore]

People have moved to Discord already! EVERYONE I know is on at least one established Discord, and it's where a lot of the interesting conversation is going. (The people interested in federation have a Discord.) I loathe Discord because I don't like chat and personally don't like all the different channels, but it is WAY easier to understand and better designed than Mastodon. From what I could see, if people left Tumblr, some went to Dreamwidth, a lot went to Tumblr, but EVERYONE went to Discord. (Which is a little bit of the source of my sourness with a system that requires invites and doesn't have a centralized directory and where a lot depends on Who You Know.) Even I have an actual Discord account and had a bunch of conversations on it. And I hate it! LOL. It's worse than Tumblr for feeling like all the interesting stuff and fun is happening where you can't find it, except at least on Tumblr I could vainly search.

I think the problem some people might have with Discord is it's a privately owned company -- it's freeware but it's owned by the CEO I think, Jason Citron, and they've just done the valuation polka to the tune of $2B. "Before Discord, Jason was the founder and CEO of OpenFeint, the biggest social mobile gaming platform, which sold to GREE in 2011 for $104 million." Sooo....that sounds familiar.

The other thing about Discord that gives me pause, besides how I don't do chat and I don't like the setup, is I was around for heavy IRC use way back when (and AIM and meebo and other things) and wow was there a ton of wank, fannish and personal.

[kore]

OH GOD, that "You can take control of your content by being able to control other peoples' reblogs!" idea. I could see where they were coming from and why, but that was like out of the frying pan into the inferno. Tumblr actually had the capacity to do something similar! They quickly dropped it.

[kore]

I dunno, but from what I have seen, the people interested in fannish federation want it to be neutral re content -- i.e. they'll work with antis AND with the HTP. And I'm just like....good luck with that, they couldn't even coexist on Tumblr. And I personally want to share as little fannish space with antis as possible.

[kore]

Yeah, I was amazed at how much less depressed I feel personally with all the conversation coming back to DW. I loved it before, but now it's like a big shot in the arm! And I love conversations you can go back to and threaded comments and everything not be dependent on timing. One thing I really dislike about Discord is it still seems if you aren't there at the right moment, or are in the wrong time zone, you miss out on conversations, and it's hard to go back to them. (I know people say they can do it, but every time I've tried, it's been crickets.)

[kore]

this circles back around to the monetizing-fandom discussion

YUP

I was also thinking that. It is perhaps dependent on an idealized view of free labour that not everybody shares.