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]

Mmhm. And I'm not even just thinking about bad faith, I'm thinking about incompetence and mods getting in over their heads and the kind of wildfires you get when you have two communities marginalized along the same axis in different directions and mods whose family life unexpectedly explodes calling them away and mods who stop being interested in one fandom and mods who run out of money to run the hosting instance and--

Like, at a certain point, it goes beyond trusting and into "I don't think there are enough people with the emotional, financial, and attentional stability to do this as a labor of love in a sustainable way."

[kore]

Like, at a certain point, it goes beyond trusting and into "I don't think there are enough people with the emotional, financial, and attentional stability to do this as a labor of love in a sustainable way."

Yeah, at this point I would much, MUCH rather pay for a small, centralized, secure space, AKA Dreamwidth, than leap into a big unknown with a lot of different rules that's still being thrashed out and where it seems like the emphasis is going to be on "learn as we go" and "we can't answer questions until we're in the middle of specific situations, it's all going to depend." Godspeed to the people with the energy and time who are willing to do that, but it's just not me right now. I remember just barely witnessing, being on the edges, of some truly nasty Tumblr wank and even that was nervewracking.

[stellahibernis]

I've felt like my reaction to the whole fediverse thing is like, "yeah, okay, BUT", and you've voiced a lot of those buts here in this post and comments. The amount of power so many people will have, as well as the amount of work that'll need to be put into running things worries me about it most, because it just feels very unrealistic at this point in time.

[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.

[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.