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 07:28 pm (UTC)Discord to me seems a little less ephemeral in terms of stuff like being able to search your @ history (I don't know how far back it goes, though) and pinned posts. But I confess that yeah, I don't see what I say in chat as some kind of permanent record that I want preserved so I can refer back to it later.
I think the whole idea with the 'mothership' centralized encrypted server that you can opt-in to be backed up on is meant to counter that. Altho there also seems to be a question of whether you can move along all your content from one federated server to another? IDK.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 12:27 am (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2019-02-04 03:21 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-05 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:16 pm (UTC)This is not how most people operate, I believe.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-06 05:41 pm (UTC)Honestly even DW doesn't explicitly ban right-wing hate groups, we just ban many of their favorite tactics (doxxing, harrassing other users, inciting violence, etc) - the way they've handled actual complaints is probably more telling than a ToS (though $5 is that they pulled a 'we're just a platform!' argument).
That said I feel like Discord is really positioned as a chat application, not a microblogging one (to the point where I didn't even remotely consider it that way until this conversation), so it's more like being banned from an IRC channel or kicked from an AIM chat room - but like IRC, the rules and the mods are going to vary pretty wildly depending on where you are.