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

[melannen]

I keep thinking of the Fediverse as being basically the days after Strikethrough but before Tumblr, where there were:

a) people on LJ who didn't care and didn't want to leave;
b) people on DW who didn't like LJ's modding (and many of them also hated JF's modding and didn't think GJ's was reliable and objected to IJ's choices and wanted a site that was more up-to-date than DJ)
c) people on JF who didn't like LJ's modding (and many of them also didn't trust DW's modding and didn't think GJ's was reliable and objected to IJ's choices and wanted a site that was more up-to-date than DJ)
d) people on IJ and GJ and DJ because take your pick of the above.

Those were all, pretty much, instances of the open-source LJ software, in exactly the way the fediverse uses the term. And there were a lot of high hopes for awhile that this might actually become a fully distributed system where you could be on whichever instance you wanted and still be part of one big community. And indeed, between crossposting clients, and openID, and RSS feeds, which were all getting better all the time, you could mostly still read and interact with people on other sites, except when for some reason you couldn't, or when somebody had locked their content down to just the one instance, or as the mods of the smaller instances got tired of bothering and stopped maintaining the sites and stuff started breaking on them.

(And there are still a few people who do that kind of federation between LJ/DW/Twitter/Tumblr with the same sorts of tools we used in 2010 - rss, ittt, crossposting clients, etc.)

Fediverse makes the crossposting/reading/interacting a lot more seamless than it was back then, and it's designed from the ground up to work as interlocking intances instead being kludged together like the distributed LJ system was. But it still has the problem that instances can talk to each other just fine until for some reason someone decides to stop talking to someone else. And it still has the social problems around different sites with different mod policies and people not trusting the mods on other sites.

And frankly, the main reason people stopped bothering to keep trying to maintain the smaller interlocking LJ instances is that it was just easier to all be on one site that was proven to be stable and to have reasonably reliable modding, and stop having to mess with it. And I don't want to go back either...

[sciatrix]

Mmmmmmmmmmhm. I sometimes think that especially the kind of Linux-friendly no-one's-gonna-control-me decentralization-is-the-way-to-go types underweight the costs of learning all of the poorly documented home-made tools that everyone pays, because those sorts of folks a) are usually experts in the platform types and generally coding specialists of some stripe, so maintaining this expertise is literally part of their day job and relatively cheap, and b) overweight the costs of centralization relative to the rest of fandom, such that the costs of decentralizing seem a small price to pay, because c) they seem to be less reliant on social networks qua social networks of the variety where the time spent maintaining them is a valuable investment and anything that disrupts those networks can be a heavy price indeed.

I just. There is a very toxic-masculinity flavor of devaluing lasting social connections and the inevitable disruption to those connections that comes with any platform shift of attention that makes me purse my lips and squint.

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

[melannen]

Yep.

I do think one of the things fediverse does better than what we're comparing it too is that it's *supposed* to be pretty easy to switch servers without disrupting your social connections, but I think that only remains true as long as the different servers are all basically the same, in terms of both tech and moderation. And we see how long that lasted with the LJ instances.

(That the answer to the question of what happens if the software versions on different implentations start to drift apart was "if they aren't running the most recent version nobody should talk to them anyway" didn't make me... optimistic, on how well this will scale if we get to the point where we run out of linux-y types to run all the servers. Not to mention the idea that linux-y types can keep it going without forking all over the place... Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

[kore]

Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

BLESS

I'm always reminded of that bit in Stephenson's Command Line where he tries opening an earlier Word document with a later Word program and gets gibberish. Not a good thing!

[silveradept]

Cheers to backwards compatibility as a social justice issue. And, as a fellow librarian, we both know that it's often a matter of necessity as well for making sure that our user bases can still interact with the world around them.

[sylvaine]

I think I want "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!" on a t shirt. *g*

[melannen]

I would wear that shirt!

[kore]

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

I want this on a t-shirt.

[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

[sciatrix]

What's Finnish consensus? *chinhands*

And oh yeah, agree re: fiddling around with code. Hell, that coding gets more and more attractive to me as I age--it's less emotionally exhausting! And I can take breaks from it!

[jesse_the_k]

“Finnish” is “fannish” in iOS’ mundane little autocorrect AI.

The hazards of reply by email is that my SPAG* register plunges to txtish.

*spelling and grammar

**checked three times but I bet there’s still an error here

[kore]

Oh boy, I remember when people were crossposting from Twitter, and everyone on LJ HATED it. Just hated it and would not put up with it. Even if you put it behind a cut and tagged it and it was completely avoidable, people still complained voraciously about it. It was one of those things where people just quit doing it because it wasn't worth the vicious sniping you would get.

And there were a lot of high hopes for awhile that this might actually become a fully distributed system where you could be on whichever instance you wanted and still be part of one big community. And indeed, between crossposting clients, and openID, and RSS feeds, which were all getting better all the time, you could mostly still read and interact with people on other sites

Hmmm, I don't personally remember this happening. What I do remember is people keeping comments open on both DW and LJ, but posting to one or the other and crossposting, and the discussions would get split, and then comments got imported, and it was more a question of playing catchup rather than "this person on DW said this in a comment, and this person on LJ is now replying to that," which is my impression of what the goal of the fediverse is. I just don't remember it as working that way at all. I remember people mirroring on IJ, but it was as a backup. Most people I knew used IJ for RP, it wasn't stable enough and not enough people were there for being part of that kind of network.

I do have one (1) person on my DW flist who consistently used ITTT to post from Tumblr mostly to DW, with the result that they had a lot of interaction on Tumblr, and almost none on the DW xposts. When Tumblr went up in flames they went back to mostly posting on DW, and people picked up on that and started commenting more. But from what I could see the perception wasn't so much "Ah, here I can comment on stuff that was originally on Tumblr and keep in touch that way," but more "This is a backup for Tumblr and considered less important than that site." -- Even though the person would respond to comments on the DW posts! I think a lot of people have that perception that if something is a mirror, it's a backup that's not going to get a lot of attention.

What I do see people using ITTT for mostly is notifications across various websites, mostly for PR. But that's as a broadcasting thing.

[melannen]

I don't know anyone who crossposts from twitter, but there are still a few twitter accounts that come by my network page on RSS feeds...

When DW was still in closed beta, there were fairly firm plans to make it so you could just plain read you LJ friends list, including locked posts and comments, from DW (IIRC it's basically just an RSS feed, so it should've been possible.) But it stalled out on a) technical issues (which Fediverse has hopefully solved, at least until the backwards compatibility issues start adding up), b) security/authentication issues around being able to read locked content (which I think Fediverse has solved? Although I wonder how that works in terms of servers blocking each other, if they've previously accessed each others' locked content), c) issues around the fact that DW was dependent on LJ choosing to let them keep doing it (still an issue) and d) social issues around people freaking out about control of their content (always an issue).

So IDK.

I've been wondering how comment-split works on fediverse sites, in terms of which server controls which content - if you have a conversation happening across two different servers and they block each other, what happens to the different parts of the conversation? I don't think I understand the blocking mechanics well enough to ask the question right, though.

[kore]

Oh wow, I hadn't even thought about THAT re servers blocking and cross-commenting, or reading locked content. (I had thought that DW gave up the idea of reading your LJ flist because the security for locked entries just wasn't good enough? It's a really vague memory, though.)

[jenett]

There's an explanation in an old (2010) DW News post: basically, they couldn't come up with a solution that LJ wouldn't lock out (also affecting all the other interconnection like cross-posting, etc.) almost immediately.

There's some further discussion of details in comments, but an outline in the post itself.

[syntheid]

security/authentication issues around being able to read locked content (which I think Fediverse has solved? Although I wonder how that works in terms of servers blocking each other, if they've previously accessed each others' locked content)

This is where it started getting concerning to me. As I looked into how stuff like deleting worked (on Mastodon, I'm not sure about Hubzilla or other options, but I assume it's similar), what happens is your server that you're on sends a request out to all the other federation instances saying "hey you should delete this". If the other servers are compliant, they will. If they're non-compliant, who knows? They could refuse to delete it and your content is now on that other server until they decide to get rid of it. Probably if a non-compliant server like that was found, they'd get blacklisted to prevent future problems, but there isn't really a way to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Compliance aside, it's not instantaneous, so that's kinda weird anyway. Even if the server is compliant to my request to delete a post and does take it down, there might be a delay as it receives the request and processes it.

So in terms of blocking, it's possible you'd have an intermediate state where you could still see posts that are technically blocked or something. (I just tried this myself with accounts on different instances and yeah, it won't immediately remove the locked post from view when the account is blocked, even though it does immediately show up when I post it.)

Tangentially, I don't love that Mastodon decided on a more simple algorithm to decide permissions to view 'locked' posts, especially since it's based on who follows you and not who you're following. It makes you be strangely picky about who is allowed to follow even your public posts if you ever make personal posts under 'lock'.

[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?)

[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.

[melannen]

I have been told that one of the benefits of Mastodon is that all the good guys have already blocked White Power Federated so they're all stuck in their own little corner only talking to each other. I'm not sure that's actually a great outcome, though. And of course, that means that every new instance has to already just know where White Power Federated is and that they need to block it.

It's like they've decided that running an entire social nework around the concept of everybody knowing about the missing staircase is the ideal.

[kore]

It's like they've decided that running an entire social nework around the concept of everybody knowing about the missing staircase is the ideal.

THAT'S TOTALLY IT, yes.

[havocthecat]

It's not that I want to share a social network with white power advocates (but if there are any on Dreamwidth, I've obviously managed to miss them), but who makes the decision on what constitutes a missing stair and locks them out? What happens when someone decides that Reylo shippers are Nazi instances and they should be locked out, and that Hydra Trash Party instances are a missing stair and deserve to be locked out? It's hard to just go and join another mailing list where slash isn't banned if your entire ID can't see your Hydra Trash Party and Stormpilot friends won't talk to your Reylo friends. (They may not already, I don't know SW dynamics, I pay NO ATTENTION to any of this stuff.)

I'm just going to wave my hands around and think about it for a bit and mull on our fannish history in light of all of this. I'm not sure about how I feel about all of this.

[brithistorian]

As I think more it about it, it would also depend on White Power Federated staying in the same instances, rather than regularly creating new instances and forcing everyone into a giant game of whack-a-mole. Plus it also doesn't take into account that the individual members of White Power Federated would be as likely as not to just colononize someone else's instance.

[ljwrites]

One function that may help in this case is the ability of individuals to block instances. So even if your instance mod won't block antis.instance on an instance level, you can do it from your own account so posts made on antis.instance won't show up in the federated timeline for you and accounts on anti.instance can't interact with you.

[brithistorian]

I was unaware of that function - that definitely makes a difference. It makes it as if the people you don't want to talk with are signing themselves up for a block list!

[havocthecat]

I pity the poor person on anti.instance to hang with their friends who gets blocked by everyone even though they're not an anti.

I can't see this going horribly awry and making the fandom polarization worse.