what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?
Feb. 2nd, 2019 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrixSo 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![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 04:29 pm (UTC)Thing is I have vivid memories of waking up to a mailing list, and thus the fandom, on fire. I remember mailing lists that just disappeared overnight because the mod didn't want to do it anymore. Sometimes you'd get notice, sometimes just one last message from the list explaining things.
I don't really want to go back to obsessively backing up everything I see that I like because it might disappear tomorrow. I know we could all wake up tomorrow and have DW gone, but that's highly unlikely. There's too many people and it's a business for
no subject
Date: 2019-02-03 06:08 pm (UTC)Right? And I've identified why I'm so much more comfortable hanging out here in Denise and Mark's space, or over on MeFi Cortex' space--partly it is that I trust all of them to be good community stewards insofar as that goes, but I also feel safer with actual paid professionals whose job it is to look after the day to day and the server costs and the possibility of Nazis setting up camp and needing to be ejected. Like, I feel safer trusting them to stick around and put the work into the community if they are being paid to do so, and also I feel better about using the space if they are making a good wage and taken care of financially in response to the work they are doing. I have seen the state of open source freeware, and it is invariably the sort of thing built as people have time, fixed and documented slowly, and very, very tragedy of the commons-style kludgeware.
Paying for good work is safer and fairer, because you aren't gambling that someone else will keep wanting to do it for love or for power or for their own interest, while also having to do paid work elsewhere that takes up their full priorities and attention. I would rather find people who are good at this kind of thing, who I trust to continue being good at this kind of thing, and pay them to focus on doing it full time for my own benefit.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 04:38 pm (UTC)(It does, of course, help that these days I have my own money to throw at people. But still. Anything that relies exclusively or near-exclusively on free labour makes me twitch. Of course, so does anything that has fucking ~~investors~~ involved, so there's really not that many options left!)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:17 pm (UTC)Fuck capitalism, anyway!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:21 pm (UTC)Or at least the horrible wealth gap where the actual capital is circulating around the 10% and the rest of us are doing Gofundmes for medical care! WTF!
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:32 pm (UTC)